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| (Photo Source: AMD) |
Samsung and AMD announced a partnership last year that was replete with the usual "forward-looking" statements and showed nothing. It was highly believed that Samsung would license AMD's Radeon graphics technology for use in its own Exynos chips. It hasn't been born yet, but it may be worth the wait if these initial benchmark figures for the anonymous chip will see performance on the new Samsung flagship next year.
While ARM chips have become powerful today, they are still far behind their desktop counterparts for graphics performance. ARM's "vanilla" Mali GPUs and Qualcomm's custom Adreno are practically the only options that smartphone manufacturers have. They also actually have fewer options because these GPUs are connected to CPUs that come with the whole system-on-chip or SoC.
The third choice may come but only for those who would invest in Samsung's Exynos processor. As NVIDIA's Tegra is out of the picture, AMD's Radeon IPs threaten the promise of a well-known desktop graphics technology but are custom-made for mobile devices. Based on SamMobile's report, there may be something to that promise as well.
A GFXBench listing for the AMD RDNA architecture that will be used on future Samsung Exynos chips surpasses the current Qualcomm Adreno 650 in several synthetic benchmark tests. This is used in the Adreno GPU Snapdragon 865 which is already ahead of the race except Apple's A13.
This is certainly good for Samsung, whose Exynos chips have lagged behind and even become the center of some controversy. Samsung may introduce the AMD GPU next year in an Exynos 1000 that may also be the industry's first 5nm process chip.
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