What determines a fair portion of success of new smartphones is the brain of the devices: the mobile application processor.

With the news of an upcoming January launch of the Samsung Galaxy S21 series, attention is moving to what will be the core AP of the upcoming gadgets.

According to various industry sources on Thursday, Samsung is highly likely to adopt the latest edition of its in-house chipset, supposedly called Exynos 2100, for the highest-end model of the Galaxy S21 series.

Through a YouTube clip titled “Exynos: Thank You,” Samsung hinted at an imminent launch of its new chipset for mobile devices.

The clip provided explanations of the upcoming chipset, which highlighted adoption of 5G modem for seamless streaming and a neural processing unit for intelligent camera features.

The Exynos 2100’s central processing unit has also been improved to meet the growing needs for smooth multitasking, while its graphic processing unit has been advanced to process high-spec content for extended reality experiences on mobile devices, the clip showed.

Samsung has been collaborating with AMD to improve the chipset’s GPU capabilities since this year.

The GPU in mobile chipsets has become more significant in terms of overall performance of high-end smartphones in line with growing demand for mobile games and augmented reality services.

But Samsung has traditionally used its own chipset for models for select markets like Korea, Europe and India, while using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon for phones shipped largely to the US, using its multi-vendor strategy.

Some European consumers complained about the performance of previous Exynos chips, especially about this year‘s Galaxy S20 models using Exynos 990 chips.

According to US-based IT device performance evaluation site Geekbench, Samsung’s Exynos 2100 in the Galaxy S21 Ultra model scored slightly lower than its rival Snapdragon 888, the latest chipset by Qualcomm.

Snapdragon chips have usually been superior to Exynos chips in terms of battery life, refresh rate, download speed, camera sensor and other factors, according to tech reviewers.

Ironically, they both are manufactored at Samsung‘s foundry plant.

“The Exynos 2100 chipset will be the first outcome of the recently restructured organization of Samsung’s System LSI Business, whose performance and sales will both be important for the top brass of the company,” said an industry watcher.

In the case of the Galaxy 20 series, Samsung equipped phones bound for Europe with its in-house Exynos 990 chips, while adopting Snapdragon 865 for other markets, including the US and Korea.

But some industry officials speculate that the Korean tech giant could again adopt the Exynos 2100 for the Galaxy S21 phones to be released in its home market next year.

By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)