New information from Samsung’s home market suggests that the company is planning to make a new line of chips for its Galaxy smartphones, which is surprising because its Exynos chipsets haven’t managed to reach the level of big players like Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple. Samsung has been shipping its flagships with Exynos processors in select markets ever since the Galaxy S arrived with the ‘Hummingbird’ chip back in 2010. Samsung poached experts from Intel, ARM, and AMD to build its Exynos ambitions, but the results haven’t been promising.

Even if one sets aside the performance gulf between Exynos and its rivals, optimization has been another issue that has historically resulted in some glaring problems for Samsung flagships with in-house chips. From camera performance issues and GPS woes to irregular jitters and bad thermal management, Exynos-powered flagships have cultivated an undesirable reputation over the years. The chip woes have been carried forward to another generation of phones in 2022, with the Galaxy S22 series being the most recent example.

Related: Samsung May Release A Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, With A Massive Battery Upgrade

So how Samsung can solve the issues with Exynos? The most obvious answer would be to get rid of the Exynos lineup and look elsewhere to buy chips for its phones, even if only for the flagships. But doing that would just be an official admission that Exynos was a bad product all along, and the reputation hit would eventually doom Exynos’ prospects on low-end and mid-range phones, too. An alternate solution is going back to the drawing board and designing better chips, while also sunsetting the Exynos brand. Samsung appears to be doing just that. As per a report by Korean publication iNews24, Samsung’s mobile division chief, Tae-moon Roh, revealed at a town hall meeting that the company will make processors exclusively for its Galaxy smartphones. Currently, Exynos chips are also used by other brands, such as Vivo.

Samsung Can Forget Exynos & Still Win

Samsung Galaxy S22 with Exynos inside.

The Samsung executive’s comment was made in response to the recent throttling controversy involving the preinstalled Game Optimizing Service (GOS) slowing down the performance of some products. Even though Samsung argued that the throttling was done to strike a balance between offering optimum performance and thermals, the company eventually released an update that allowed users to disable the system.

At the moment, it is unclear if the Galaxy-exclusive chips in question will make their debut under the Exynos brand, or if they will feature new branding altogether. The latter would make more sense for Samsung. The Exynos brand doesn’t have the best reputation, and if anything, it has only deteriorated lately. On the other hand, Samsung’s partnership with AMD for improving the graphics performance of its chips has only just begun to materialize. Assuming that the report is true, Samsung is confident enough in its capabilities to make an improved processor that is unique to Galaxy smartphones and will supposedly be better than past Exynos chips.

Upping its efforts to deliver a better processor with a different name will allow Samsung to get rid of the bad reputation garnered by the Exynos lineup and start anew with its ambitions to match the firepower and reliability of Qualcomm and Apple’s mobile chips. Retiring Exynos might sound like a defeat, but if a rebrand can reinvigorate Samsung’s in-house SoC business and deliver better chips, it could be a win for both Samsung and Galaxy smartphone users.