Will AMD partners with Samsung to bring Radeon graphics to smartphones?
Samsung and AMD today announced a multi-year cooperation agreement in which Samsung electronic semiconductors will be licensed for graphical IP from AMD and used in Samsung’s mobile GPU. The move is almost disruptive for the mobile graphics sector, as it marks the product that Samsung will advance its own internal GPU architecture in the future Exynos chipset.
Samsung is rumored to have started work on its s-gpu research unit as early as 2012.Samsung is now handing over the new IP to a new SAN jose division called the ACL (Advanced Computing Lab), which has a joint charter with SARC(Samsung Austin research and development center).Samsung mainly designs mobile CPU and storage controller IP in SARC.
Through the partnership, Samsung will receive “custom graphics IP” licensed from AMD. But there’s not a lot that’s been said about the IP. In fact, there’s a lot that’s been said about what the IP is.
Samsung’s own GPU architecture has been going on for up to 7 years and has been integrated into the tested silicon chipset. Unless the deal was signed a few years ago and only announced publicly today, it could mean that the current hotly debated IP is just a patent transaction, and that the current product will not be the design that integrates AMD’s new architecture IP. From this point of view, the outside world’s claim to punch Qualcomm is somewhat exaggerated. For now, at least, this may still not be realistic. Of course, if the hypothesis is wrong, nature is a different matter.
Samsung’s new GPU IP is the first design to start from scratch. The announcement by both sides could mean Samsung buying patent boxes from AMD to shield it from possible lawsuits by other industry players. It could also mean Samsung ditching its own internal core computing design in favour of AMD’s new IP. The announcement specifically mentions that “custom graphics IP is based on the recently announced highly scalable RDNA graphics architecture. “AMD CEO su zi-feng also said it has “significantly expanded its user base and developed an ecosystem.”By extension, AMD CEO’s ecosystem expansion makes no sense when it comes to intellectual property alone. This also seems to mean that Samsung will actually adopt the IP.
In addition, the licensing agreement also mentions mobile devices that cover a range of smartphones. It seems that this also means that Samsung will not use the new graphics IP on devices such as laptops. And that may be the subject of much debate, and if Samsung uses the graphical IP of AMD, what will happen to the market in the future?
At present, smartphone SoC suppliers mainly include Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and Apple. And the Apple A series processor GPU with its tough performance, followed by the GPU in the Qualcomm Dragon Chip, Samsung Exynos and MediaTek Heilo chip because of the use of ARM public GPU architecture, the performance of a slight loss. But the Adenro series GPU in the Qualcomm Dragon Chip, which now accounts for half of the Android system, also has several connections to AMD. Today, Samsung’s partnership with AMD is perhaps the most stressful or previously mentioned Qualcomm. But whether or not it can bring new changes to this market, perhaps we need to wait and see.
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