Samsung’s Galaxy S27 plans are already looking a bit bargain-bin, with the Exynos 2700 reportedly losing useful chip packaging.
The Galaxy S27 lineup, due in early 2027, could feature watered-down specs as Samsung wrestles with the DRAM crisis. The rest of the industry is stuck in the same memory price swamp, but Samsung has the added joy of trying to sell Exynos chips again.
Earlier rumours claimed the base Galaxy S27 could use BOE-made OLED panels to keep prices down. Now the Exynos 2700, expected to power a slice of Galaxy S27 handsets, may lose a key technical feature despite using Samsung’s second-generation 2nm GAA process.
According to Sisajournal, Samsung’s biggest cost-cutting move could be ditching FOWLP, or fan-out wafer-level packaging. Samsung introduced the packaging with the Exynos 2400.
FOWLP helps smartphone chipsets become smaller, thinner and faster by building electrical circuits outside the SoC die area. The design allows more I/O pins to fit into a smaller footprint. It can improve heat resistance and sustained performance, which is rather important when your chip history includes thermal throttling and fan forums pretending it is fine.
For Samsung’s Exynos range, this sort of packaging is less a luxury and more a fire extinguisher with a bill of materials attached. Unfortunately, RAM prices have reached silly territory, so Samsung appears to be eyeing the red pen.
Removing FOWLP could hurt the Exynos 2700’s performance by allowing more heat to build up.
Samsung might try to address the problem with a side-by-side architecture (SBS), which places the processor and DRAM on the same substrate. That setup would allow a heatsink to cover both parts, helping keep temperatures from charging into throttling territory quite so quickly.
Memory chips can get extremely hot, so the idea has some technical sense. It still feels like Samsung is swapping a tailored cooling jacket for a cheaper hat, hoping nobody notices in summer.
Any performance hit could make its non-memory business turnaround harder, since previous reports suggested the Exynos 2700’s adoption in the Galaxy S27 series will matter to that recovery.
That leaves Samsung with a grim trade-off. Keep the better packaging and risk pushing Galaxy S27 prices higher, or cut the feature and hope reviewers do not spend launch week posting thermal charts.
Still, if removing FOWLP lets the Exynos 2700 hit the right price without making the Galaxy S27 look too expensive, Samsung may take the hit.
