Samsung’s next-generation Exynos soc gets AMD GPU

The high-end soc that should follow the Exynos 2100 announced on Tuesday will contain a GPU based on AMD’s RDNA architecture. Samsung announced this when it announced the Exynos 2100.

Samsung is working with AMD to provide the next ‘flagship’ soc in the Exynos line with an AMD GPU. That confirms Inyup Kang, president of Samsung’s System LSI division, which includes the production of the Exynos. The CEO did not give any further details about the integration of the AMD GPU.

Kang gave confirmation after the announcement of the Exynos 2100. That soc, which Samsung will use for the Galaxy S21 models, has an Arm Mali-G78 GPU. The counterpart of the Exynos 2100, the Snapdragon 888 from Qualcomm, contains an Adreno 660 as a GPU. Adreno, an anagram of Radeon, is Qualcomm’s GPU line and ATi helped Qualcomm with that GPU development in the early years. Qualcomm took over AMD’s mobile GPU division in 2009, after which it continued to work independently on the graphics chips.

In June 2019, AMD and Samsung announced that they would be working together on energy-efficient GPUs for smartphones, with Samsung purchasing a license to use AMD’s RDNA architecture. Later that year, Samsung announced that it expected the first release to be in two years, or this year. Samsung is no longer working on its own cores for the Exynos line, but uses Arm’s Cortex architecture.