Samsung Electronics and AMD have extended their “multi-year” GPU licensing agreement to bring AMD Radeon graphics solutions to more Samsung Exynos chipsets. The partnership was first announced in July 2019 and resulted in Exynos 2200 with an RDNA2-based Xclipse 920 integrated GPU. As Samsung and AMD highlight in their joint press statement, “Xclipse was the industry’s first mobile GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading features for console-like gameplay on mobile devices.”
The Exynos 2200 faced poor reception and fell short of the performance and power efficiency offered by Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. The primary issue was with Samsung’s 5nm process. This resulted in Samsung Mobiles opting not to introduce any Exynos model for the flagship Galaxy S23 series in the subsequent year. Nevertheless, the Xclipse GPU performed admirably in executing Ray Tracing.
It’s hard to say how closely the two companies will be working in developing GPU IPs. The new announcement reaffirms Samsung Electronics’ intentions to jump back into the high-end SoC game and these will continue to push forward AMD Radeon Graphics. Meanwhile, AMD can take advantage of its widely recognized GPU architectures and broaden its revenue streams.
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Ray tracing on mobile phones is still in an early phase and will take some time to go mainstream. Right now we are still waiting for games to offer support. Perhaps when the feature passes on to mid-range phones developers will be more enthusiastic about adding it to their games. Meanwhile, it will serve its purpose of giving OEMs some bragging rights and allowing them to distinguish their high-end products.
“Together with AMD, Samsung has been revolutionizing mobile graphics, including our recent collaboration that brought ray tracing capability to mobile processors for the first time in the industry,” said Seogjun Lee, Executive Vice President of Application Processor (AP) Development at Samsung Electronics. “Drawing on our technological know-how in designing ultra-low-power solutions, we will continue to drive ongoing innovation in the mobile graphics space.”