Reports originating from Korea suggest that Samsung will start the mass production of its Exynos 8890 chipset at a factory in Giheung in the Gyeonggi Province of Korea from late December. This will be the company’s first chipset to utilise its own custom designed or tweaked ARM cores.

The chipset will be based on the 14nm FinFET fabrication process from Samsung, and will be clocked at 2.3GHz. Early benchmarks indicate that the chip already bests the A9 chip found inside the iPhone 6s in single core benchmarks.

An industry official commented: “Designing its own mobile core will allow Samsung, which produces both smartphones and semiconductors, to gain competitive edge over Apple and Qualcomm in reducing cost and optimizing chip products for smartphones.”

Samsung will be using the Exynos 8890 chipset inside its 2016 flagship handset — the Galaxy S7. However, the company also plans on using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset inside certain variants of the handset.

Samsung is reportedly pretty serious about its own custom APs for use inside its devices as it can give it a competitive advantage over Apple and other Android OEMs.

Samsung is not the only OEM in the Android ecosystem that is looking to develop its own mobile CPU though. LG, another Korean smartphone maker, had released a phone with its own custom chipset — dubbed NUCLUN — last year, though it failed to impress anyone.

Qualcomm is already known for supplying its custom designed chipsets to Android OEMs for use inside their smartphones. In a bid to get its first high-end 64-bit chipset out to consumers this year, the company ended up going with ARM’s A57 and A53 cores inside its Snapdragon 810 chipset, which ended up turning it into a fiery mess.