Samsung today announced a partnership with AMD which will bring Radeon-powered graphics to Samsung’s future Exynos-based processors.
AMD’s main competition in the mobile graphics market is ARM and PowerVR. However, AMD has often touted its low-power embedded graphics solutions. The new partnership should prove fruitful for both Samsung and AMD.
Exactly what the new architecture will enable remains to be seen, but given that Samsung has ditched long-term partner ARM, AMD is either pricing competitively, or has a powerful solution.
The key details of the exchange are that Samsung will pay licensing and royalty fees to AMD, who will provide Samsung with a “custom graphics IP” based on AMD’s RDNA architecture which was announced at the company’s Computex keynote. The scalable architecture is also used in AMD’s upcoming Radeon desktop cards. Sony has also chosen AMD’s RDNA architecture for its next PlayStation gaming console.
“Adoption of our Radeon graphics technologies across the PC, game console, cloud and HPC markets has grown significantly and we are thrilled to now partner with industry leader Samsung to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “This strategic partnership will extend the reach of our high-performance Radeon graphics into the mobile market, significantly expanding the Radeon user base and development ecosystem.”
It will be interesting to see what devices Samsung use these graphics in and how much of an improvement it is over their current graphics processors.
