6.3″ Samsung Galaxy Note III to have Exynos 5 Octa CPU. Samsung looks to China to replace Apple orders

Vlad Bobleanta  By on 16 Jan 13

Samsung’s chip making division wants to lower its reliance on orders from Apple. Countless times so far, Apple was rumored to slowly move away from the Korean company as one of its major suppliers of mobile device parts, probably because of the many ongoing legal spats between the two. That hasn’t happened yet (at least not on a very noticeable level), but it might just be inevitable.

So Samsung wants to be sure it has customers that can step in and ensure that the Korean company’s sales won’t drop if the Californian fruit company finally pulls the plug on the cooperation between the two. And even if Apple stays with Samsung for the foreseeable future, it’s never healthy for one of your customers to make up too much of your total sales levels.

With that in mind, Samsung top executives including Samsung Electronics CEO Kwon Oh-hyun held meetings with Chinese companies to which they want to sell more processors. The meetings happened in Las Vegas during this year’s CES.

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A Huawei official apparently confirmed that his company was approached by Samsung, and said that Huawei has nothing against working with Samsung if the Koreans offer “favorable conditions”. A ZTE official was quoted as saying that his company needs “better chips with better pricing”. That may of course indicate that ZTE is also more than willing to do business with Samsung.

Huawei and ZTE may be the big names in the Chinese smartphone space right now, but there are a few other companies that are up-and-coming and could also become Samsung customers in the near future (Yulong Coolpad and TCL quickly come to mind, but they aren’t the only ones).

At the moment, Apple is estimated to make up around 80% of Samsung’s logic chip division’s revenue. That percentage is rumored to drop significantly over the next few years.

However, an unnamed Samsung told The Korea Times that “more smartphone releases by Chinese makers are giving a new business chance for us to offset risks stemming from Apple. We’re not worrying too much”.

Looks like we’re about to see Exynos processors in many more devices in the near future.

Speaking of those, the recently unveiled Exynos 5 Octa, an eight-core part, will be inside the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note III when that launches later this year (almost certainly in the second half). This chipset combines four high-performance cores with four low-consumption ones to achieve what Samsung describes as the best of all worlds. Only one set of four cores can be active at the same time, though, so this isn’t a ‘true’ octa-core CPU.

The Galaxy Note III could come with a 6.3-inch touchscreen, dwarfing the 5.5-inch unit in its predecessor, as well as the 5.3-inch display in the original Galaxy Note from 2011. It would also be a little bigger than Huawei’s Ascend Mate, a positively huge device itself in this day and age, sporting a 6.1-inch screen.

If this will all turn out to be true, it definitely seems like the supersizing trend in the smartphone space is only going to continue.

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  • stargeezer

    The screen should be as big as possible while still retaining one handed “usefulness”. A 6-6.3″ screen really should be the limit in this regard – even if the phone had no bezel at all.

  • Richard Yarrell

    No question the Galaxy Note 3 will be extremely special. I look forward to this purchase.

  • (anon)

    I’m with you on this one, too many haters on net saying it’s too big. It’s not too big, with the purported specs I’d expect no less than 3GB of RAM. The only phone that will be better than this….most likely the Note 4 by which then 4GB of RAM, 64 bit architecture with ARM A57 and 1200p displays will be gracing Samsung’s true flagship. Honestly, the haters can hate all they want but there’s not a damn thing all the wannabes can do, the competition ain’t from has-beens such as IPhone or Nokia (both are a joke now). The S4 and Note 3 will be so damn far ahead of the competition that I genuinely believe only their successors will be better.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Atty-Halmágyi/100001770630008 Atty Halmágyi

    How can you say it’s not too big??? If it will be flexible, then it’s ok, but if it’s not, it’s too BIG!

  • ronf57

    This article is misleading about Huawei. It implies Huawei is considering exynos processors when Huawei has their own processor fab company making its’ processors…it’s tough to price beat your own fab and design team. So unless samsung and exynos become must have names for devices i doubt Huawei will buy them.

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