Samsung’s Xclipse 920 integrated graphics processing unit based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture did not live up to expectations, but the consumer electronics giant will continue to use AMD’s RDNA architecture for future embedded GPUs, the company said. revealed on Thursday. (opens in new tab).
“We will continue to work closely with AMD to implement other features of the RDNA series.” (opens in new tab) Sungboem Park, who oversees GPU development, is Samsung’s vice president. “In general, mobile tends to lag behind consoles by about five years when it comes to graphics technology, but working with AMD has allowed us to quickly incorporate the latest console tech into the Exynos 2200 mobile processor.
Based on the RDNA 2 architecture, AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 family of GPUs doesn’t have ray tracing as its strongest aspect, but it’s arguably the company’s most competitive GPU lineup for many years.
However, the Xclipse 920 graphics processor, based on the same architecture, did not perform well in Samsung’s Exynos 2200 system-on-chip for smartphones, either for compute or graphics workloads. As the head of Qualcomm recently revealed, Samsung has struck a deal with his Qualcomm to use his Snapdragon SoC with Adreno graphics in its upcoming Galaxy S series phones worldwide. That’s why (computer based It’s the first time I’ve noticed this). Ironically, Qualcomm’s development of his Adreno (Radeon’s Ambigram) was led by Eric Demers, who previously worked at AMD, ATI, and ArtX where he was a GPU architect.
“Qualcomm and Samsung have entered into a new multi-year agreement beginning in 2023 to globally expand the use of the Snapdragon platform in future premium Samsung Galaxy products.” Said Chief Executive Cristiano Amon at Qualcomm’s third quarter earnings call.
Samsung currently uses Qualcomm’s premium Snapdragon SoC in its Galaxy S smartphones sold in Asia and the US, while models sold in Europe use its own Exynos SoC. The new deal allows Samsung to use his Exynos for Galaxy S smartphones in Europe, but doesn’t necessarily have to. So if Samsung has his Exynos SoC with competitive CPU and GPU implementations, it might use that instead of Exynos.
However, according to Qualcomm, Samsung is certainly playing it safe with its SoC and GPU choices, as it plans to use Snapdragon in other mobile products as well.
“In addition to Galaxy smartphones, the deal includes PCs, tablets, augmented reality and more,” said Amon.
AMD’s RDNA architecture is feature-rich and scalable in terms of performance, power, and die size, but the actual implementation is critical. Achieving a GPU depends on multiple factors, including the engineering team’s experience in general and his specific GPU architecture in particular, design decisions, cost, and process technology. So Samsung may build a competitive RDNA-based integrated GPU in the future, but its engineers would need to gain general GPU development experience first, and the only way to get that is to get graphics to continue designing the processor.
