Samsung announced its partnership with AMD nearly four years ago, with the intention of using AMD’s RDNA architecture-based GPU in its mobile processors. The South Korean tech giant has decided to extend their partnership for another several years. In this article, we’ll learn more about the Samsung-AMD collaboration.
Samsung-AMD Partnership History
Samsung previously used ARM-Mali GPUs in their Exynos processors, but their performance was inadequate to defeat market leader Qualcomm. As a result, in June 2019, Samsung announced an alliance with AMD to use RDNA GPUs in Exynos. Last year, Samsung and AMD worked together on designing RDNA 2 architecture, and Samsung introduced its own Xclipse 920 GPU based on that architecture.
With the promise of console-like gameplay on mobile devices, Xclipse was the industry’s first mobile GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading features. That GPU was then used in Exynos 2200 which we witnessed in the Galaxy S22 series (Europe variant). However, the Exynos 2200 couldn’t compete with Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 as expected. In case you don’t know, AMD technology is also used in gaming consoles like PS4 and Xbox One. But most surprisingly, AMD graphics can also be found in some Intel CPUs!
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Partnership Extension
According to a recent press release from Samsung, Exynos will continue to use AMD GPUs. Seogjun Lee, Executive Vice President of Application Processor (AP) Development at Samsung Electronics said that “Together with AMD, Samsung has been revolutionizing mobile graphics, including our recent collaboration that brought ray tracing capability to mobile processors for the first time in the industry.”
AMD GPUs will likely be included in the budget and midrange chipsets as well. Xclipse GPU may soon be seen in Galaxy A, Galaxy F, and Galaxy M series smartphones, as well as more affordable Galaxy Tab series devices. With this collaboration, Samsung will get a stronger GPU, while AMD will gain more audience exposure.
- Meanwhile, check our full review of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.
