Samsung's first SoC for cars, Exynos Auto V9, will support up to 6 displays and 12 camera connections, will debut in Audi's new infotainment system in 2021
Cho Mu-Hyun / ZDNet :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff of a four-year build-out: Samsung formed its automotive team focused on infotainment and autonomous driving back in 2015, shipped the Exynos 9 8895 as its flagship mobile SoC in 2017, and pitched the DRVLINE open platform with Harman in early 2018. Exynos Auto V9 is the first chip designed for cars rather than adapted to them, and landing Audi as the launch customer gives it a premium reference design.
First-order effects
- Audi's 2021 infotainment system becomes the proving ground for Samsung's automotive silicon, giving the company a marquee design win against established auto-chip suppliers.
- The 6-display and 12-camera support targets exactly the digital-cockpit-plus-sensing architecture Samsung and Harman were pitching with DRVLINE a year earlier.
Second-order effects
- Qualcomm, which later claimed cockpit-and-ADAS convergence with Snapdragon Ride Flex and partnered with Google on AI voice assistants for dashboards, faces a credible second source for automakers wanting multi-supplier leverage on pricing.
- Harman's supplier relationships give Samsung a distribution path into other car makers beyond Audi, turning one design win into a platform pitch.
Third-order effects
- If cockpit and camera workloads keep consolidating onto single high-core-count SoCs, car electronics shifts toward the smartphone supply model — a few merchant silicon vendors competing on display/camera counts and software stacks, with tier-one suppliers integrating rather than designing chips.
The trend: Automotive computing is consolidating around smartphone-class SoC vendors, with Samsung's entry narrowing what had been a Qualcomm-led field.