AMD and Samsung to collaborate on energy-efficient GPUs for smartphones

AMD and Samsung have entered into a collaboration for several years to develop an economical graphics chip for smartphones, among other things. As part of the collaboration, Samsung will license AMD’s Radeon technology for GPUs.

The license that Samsung is purchasing from AMD is for the technology for the recently announced RDNA architecture. This is the successor to the GCN architecture on which the Navi GPU is based. AMD uses Navi GPUs for the upcoming RX 5000 series of video cards and Sony uses them for the PlayStation 5. It is the first time that the GPU technology is used for mobile applications.

Samsung and AMD have not given any details about the plans with mobile GPUs, it is not known when the first result should be ready and financial details about the collaboration are also missing. Samsung now uses Mali GPUs from ARM with its Exynos socs.

Competitor Qualcomm uses Adreno GPUs, an anagram of Radeon. Qualcomm acquired AMD’s mobile GPU division in 2009. AMD itself acquired this division when it took over ATi in 2006. The mobile GPUs were developed there under the name Imageon.