In a joint press release issued this evening, AMD and Samsung announced that they are renewing their GPU architecture licensing agreement for Samsung’s Exynos SoCs. In the latest multi-year deal between AMD and Samsung, Samsung will continue to license AMD’s Radeon graphics architecture for use in its Arm-based Exynos SoCs, and the two companies will develop “multi-generations” of GPU IP. We are committed to working together throughout
The licensing agreement extension comes just four years after Samsung and AMD announced their first licensing agreement in June 2019. Taking advantage of AMD’s excellent Radeon graphics IP, a leap forward in the mobile SoC market with access to new features and more efficient designs faster than Samsung could put its own internal efforts to work.
Its first licensing deal came with (so far) a single product, the Exynos 2200 and its RDNA2-based Xclipse 920 integrated GPU. With AMD’s switch to his GPU design, Samsung will bring cutting-edge PC-level features like hardware ray tracing and variable rate shading (VRS) to its Galaxy S22 phones, months ahead of its competitors. I was able to.
Unfortunately, the entire Exynos 2200 SoCs not well acceptedThere are many reasons for this (more than can be explained in brief news), but above all Samsung’s 5nm-class lithography process has proven to be a mess and Samsung has a yield problem. Experienced and working chips are underperforming chips. It is based on rival TSMC’s 5nm class node. The fab issues alone were so bad that Qualcomm shipped a mid-gen TSMC with a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 from Samsung.Samsung bothers to ship an Exynos variant when it comes to its latest generation Galaxy S23 phones. I didn’t even do that.
However, while Samsung is now basically taking a gap year at the high-end SoC forefront, it has previously revealed that it will continue producing Exynos SoCs, so it is still in the market for licensing GPU IP. I’m here. This brings us back to today’s extension of Samsung’s licensing agreement with AMD. Because whatever problems Samsung had with his Exynos 2200, this expansion shows that Samsung remains committed to using his GPU architecture from AMD in the long run. , Xclipse 920 is not his one-off product.
Extension announcements from the two companies are not in the way of published details. AMD will license “multi-generation” of Radeon GPU IP to Samsung, and Samsung will use the IP in its “expanding portfolio of Samsung Exynos SoCs.” No specific architecture or timeline is mentioned, nor is there any mention of how many SoCs Samsung may be considering. The overall announcement is very general in that respect as it would expand the portfolio if even one of his new Exynos SoCs using AMD’s GPU IP.
Looking at AMD’s GPU architecture roadmap, the company is currently planning GPU architectures by the end of 2024, with the RDNA 4 architecture coming soon. Given his typical two-year cycle for AMD, this is the architecture we’d expect for his desktop offering in late 2024. So if Samsung is looking to release a new AMD-powered SoC in the next 18 months, we’re much more likely to see it. It’s based on his current RDNA 3 architecture, which is used in AMD’s latest mobile SoCs and Navi 3x GPUs. Otherwise, it would be a likely candidate for RDNA 4 in the next 18 months, but little is known at this time.
On the other hand, this latest deal is an extension of Samsung and AMD’s original deal from 2019, so this is a strong case where the product restrictions from the original deal remain intact. Banned from using AMD’s GPU IP to compete with AMD, limiting Samsung’s use of IP to SoCs for smartphones and tablets. Larger, more powerful devices such as laptops were out of the question. The Windows on Arm market is still in its infancy at best, but if this limitation is still there, we won’t see Samsung using his AMD-derived design to participate.
An equally important question for future partnerships is whether Samsung and AMD will maintain their co-design approach, or whether Samsung will return to its traditional licensing model. One of the most notable aspects of the original agreement was that Samsung and AMD were working together to design Samsung’s Xclipse GPU to be used in his SoC. After four years and one product, it’s hard to tell from the outside if this really worked for both parties. So it’s no surprise to see that they both continue with that approach.
Finally, this announcement is the latest evidence that AMD is happy to continue its GPU IP licensing business. Between the semi-custom game console deal and the Samsung deal, AMD’s GPU architecture has become much more widely used than the PC market share numbers alone suggest. And while designing and improving GPU IP for other chip makers comes with some opportunity cost trade-offs, it also guarantees a revenue stream that companies are happy to receive.
