Samsung signed an agreement with AMD to introduce its graphics technologies in the Exynos series in 2019, the company wants to use a mobile AMD GPU in its own chipsets.
AMD has a hard time keeping up with NVIDIA in dedicated graphics cards. However, not all revenue has to come from direct product sales, and the strategy of offering its Radeon technology for everyone is started to pay off.
Samsung will bet on mobile AMD GPUs
AMD’s collaborations with Apple to include custom graphics chips in Macs or similar ones for Microsoft and Sony consoles are good examples of this. NVIDIA is also doing this with devices like Nintendo’s Switch, but it is not their primary focus. A couple of years ago we even saw a Vega graphics on an Intel CPU, something unthinkable because of their rivalry in processors.
The mobile AMD GPU for Samsung Exynos is the next example of these third-party manufacturer collaboration agreements. Exynos has been criticized for lack of performance against Apple’s chipsets and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon in the past. The situation was even more complicated because the South Korean firm has been marketing the same smartphones with its own and Qualcomm chipsets and the differences were appreciable.
Samsung has improved the situation with the new Exynos 2100, but it is not enough. It is on par in processing performance with the latest devices of Qualcomm, but not in graphics. The Adreno 660 in the Snapdragon 888 is estimated to outperform the Mali-G78 MP14 in the Exynos by 28%.
This will now be the case anymore because Samsung will use AMD‘s mobile GPUs with RDNA and it will be a huge leap forward for the company.
The deal between Samsung and AMD should deliver great results for the leader in mobile sales to outperform rivals in performance. We should see the new chips in the upcoming smartphones such as the Galaxy S30.
