Samsung and AMD have just announced a strategic partnership in ultra low power, high performance mobile graphics technologies. Under this new partnership, Samsung will license AMD graphics IP for use in its Exynos chips. No financial details have been disclosed, but the two companies are calling it a multi-year deal.
AMD’s Radeon graphics are currently being utilized in PCs and gaming consoles with great success. The company is now entering the mobile market, promising ultra low power and high performance.
Samsung and AMD partnership
Samsung is all set to take its GPU game a notch up by inking a deal with computing giant AMD. The South Korean behemoth will now have the architecture of AMD’s highly-scalable RDNA graphics to develop and manufacture graphics chipsets for its smartphones. The chips can also be used in other products that complement AMD product offerings. In return, the company will pay license fees and royalties to AMD.
The result of this new partnership could present us with affordable smartphones with decent graphics capabilities, as well as flagship phones with great computing power. In other terms, devices that can handle more graphic-intensive tasks without overheating or crippling battery life. It will not happen in the immediate future though, as Samsung will be required to do a good lot of optimizations first.
“As we prepare for disruptive changes in technology and discover new opportunities, our partnership with AMD will allow us to bring groundbreaking graphics products and solutions to market for tomorrow’s mobile applications,” said Inyup Kang, president of Samsung Electronics’ S.LSI Business.
With gaming phones slowly becoming a trend, several OEMs are trying to capture a market of their own. Samsung has been rumored to be making one, but nothing has come out yet. The company, however, now seems to be better-equipped than it was before. So, will we see a gaming phone from Samsung this year? While no timeframe has been given, there certainly are interesting things ahead.
