For the first time in years, Qualcomm's dominance in driving the best Android phones appears to be wavering. Google's own Tensor chipset and Samsung's Exynos chips promise unprecedented graphics performance.

But if so, Qualcomm is certainly putting on a brave face. At its annual Investor Day, the company produced a slide promising a large presence in Samsung handsets, even if the Exynos 2200 is held back.

Others have reported that the slide pictured above shows Samsung promising 40-50% of Samsung's Galaxy S devices (including perhaps the Galaxy S22, the much-delayed S21 FE, and possibly the S22 FE), but to us it appears to be a bit more ambiguous. Is Qualcomm promising that 50% of Galaxy S phones shipped will have Qualcomm chips, or that 50% of all Samsung devices shipped in 2022 will have Qualcomm chips? It is not clear.

The latter possibility has been given further credence by a report in the Korean publication The Elec. It puts the figure at 48.43%, which fits the "40-50%" figure in the slide above.

The report claims that other devices use Exynos chips (20), MediaTek (14), and UNISOC (3). However, this is likely because some devices will have both Qualcomm and Exynos variants, as the Galaxy S22 is actually rumored to do.

Historically, Samsung's Exynos chips have offered slightly inferior performance to the Qualcomm versions, but in 2022 the position could be reversed thanks to the Samsung/AMD collaboration and could be a game changer in gaming performance. There is talk of supporting ray tracing.

However, there is also talk of low yields on the new Exynos chipsets, and the global chip shortage could rear its head here as well. It has long been said that Galaxy S22 phones with Exynos chips may be limited to certain markets, so it will be worth looking into exactly what we can expect to get when this phone goes on sale early next year.

Samsung's Galaxy S22 will reportedly come in three form factors, with the slightly smaller S22 and S22 Plus (rumored to be the S22 Pro this time), a Galaxy Note-like S22 with an S Pen for scribbling and a larger display Ultra, which will be released together with the S22 Ultra.