Samsung and AMD have just announced an alliance to integrate in the smartphones of this Korean giant the new generation of RDNA graphics that we will also see in the next generation PS5 and Xbox consoles. Undoubtedly we are seen one of the best moments of AMD that is expanding its products in all sectors previously controlled by Intel, the new AMD products made in 7nm are attracting many brands while Intel is still stuck without release his 10nm products.
Key terms of the partnership include:
- AMD will license custom graphics IP based on the recently announced, highly-scalable RDNA graphics architecture to Samsung for use in mobile devices, including smartphones, and other products that complement AMD product offerings.
- Samsung will pay AMD technology license fees and royalties.
With the new AMD RDNA products we will see new graphics processors with a maximum consumption of 5W, a hardware that derives from its desktop versions with consumption between 15 and 65W. The new AMD graphics processors have an improvement of 1.25x IPC (instructions per cycle) and 1.5x performance improvement per Watt compared to the previous GCN technology.
No doubt soon we will see how the AMD RDNA GPUs are integrated into the Samsung Exynos high-end processors and where the Mali GPUs will surely be relegated to a second plane. We will see how this affects Qualcomm that already bought a long time ago the mobile technology of ATi with which I create the Adreno GPU (Radeon acronym) and it is possible that some legal action may arise if they feel threatened. On the other hand Samsung can now also choose to create WoA devices (Windows on ARM) thanks to the AMD licenses in this sector and its alliances with Microsoft. It will undoubtedly be very interesting to see how this technology evolves.
