Your next Galaxy phone from the future may share the same graphics technology of the modern Playstation and Xbox consoles. On June 3rd, Samsung teamed up with AMD to license Radeon graphics IP for use in future Exynos SOCs.
According to the official announcement, Samsung will license the “ultra-low power, high-performance mobile graphics IP” from AMD Radeon graphics. For AMD, the partnership is another design win for the company’s graphics department that also secured Microsoft’s Xbox One, Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 as big clients for highly-customized console hardware.
As a fun fact, the deal also marks AMD’s historical re-entry into the mobile graphics market since being in the industry more than a decade ago. In fact, you could say the Adreno GPUs in modern Snapdragon processors are distant relatives of the AMD mobile GPU department that AMD sold to Qualcomm in 2009.
For Samsung, licensing AMD Radeon graphics technology could be an opportunity for its in-house Exynos processors to pull ahead of its direct competitors in graphics performance and, more importantly, power efficiency. For the past few years, the majority of Samsung Exynos processors use various forms of Mali GPUs licensed from ARM to handle graphics duty. While the performance is mostly excellent, the general consensus at Anandtech is that Mali GPUs still fall behind in power efficiency compared to the Snapdragon’s in-house Adreno GPUs of the same generation.
While it remains to be seen what would come out from the deal, the upcoming Samsung Exynos processors just became a lot more interesting for mobile gamers.
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