Two years after announcing plans to bring AMD graphics to the Samsung Exynos mobile chips, it looks like the first of those chips may be ready to launch soon.
In a keynote address on Computex, AMD’s Lisa Su said that Samsung’s “next flagship” mobile system-on-a-chip will feature AMD’s custom graphics with the company’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture.
What does this mean for mobile devices powered by the chip? The kind of graphics power that was typically associated with discrete GPUs.
Su says the upcoming Exynos chip will support features like ray tracking and variable rate shading. Although that would not make it first ARM-based chip with these features (Apple’s M1 processor also supports ray tracing), that might still be enough to give Samsung an edge over rival Qualcomm.
Samsung’s recent processors have GPUs based on ARM designs in Mali, while Qualcomm uses its own Adreno graphics technology, which often outperforms ARM designs.
While it’s not clear exactly when Samsung’s Exynos-with-AMD chips will be ready to ship, Su said Samsung will share more details later this year.
It is also not entirely clear exactly who Samsung devices will use the new chips. Samsung’s most prominent mobile devices are certainly its smartphones. But the company also sells a line of high-end tablets as well as Chromebooks and Windows laptops, and some reports suggest that at least one of Samsung’s next Exynos / AMD devices will be a Windows PC.
via AMD (press release) (YouTube)
