Samsung wants to keep developing mobile GPUs with AMD

Samsung wants to continue developing mobile GPUs in collaboration with AMD. The South Korean company says mobile GPUs are a determining factor among consumers in the flagship smartphone market and that they will become important for the future AR and VR market.

The South Korean company made the claim in a vision text in which it explains the current state of affairs of its soc division. In that vision text, the collaboration with AMD is discussed and Samsung says that it has plans to continue it. Samsung introduced the Exynos 2200-soc at the beginning of this year with the Xclipse 920 GPU that it developed together with the American company. This mobile GPU is based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture and baked on Samsung’s 4nm process. The mobile graphics chip supports ray tracing and variable rate shading.

Shortly after the release of the Exynos 2200 became clear that the integrated GPU performed better than the Snapdragon 888, but still lags behind the performance of the GPU of Apple’s A15 soc. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 also achieved significantly better results in GPU benchmarks than the Exynos 2200-soc with the new Xclipse GPU.

Despite the desire to continue working with AMD, it seems that the upcoming Galaxy S23 devices will not contain Samsung socs with AMD GPUs. At the beginning of July, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo announced that those devices will only run on Qualcomm SOCs. The Exynos 2300 to be developed by Samsung may not be able to compete with the Snapdragon equivalent.

Nevertheless, the mobile GPU division remains important for Samsung. Topman Sungboem Park states in the vision text that consumers who are in the market for a new flagship smartphone will draw their attention to the graphic performance of such a device. According to the man, the gaming performance becomes one of the differentiating factors. According to Park, mobile GPUs would also become increasingly important in the context of AR and VR.

Exynos 2200 SoC