Samsung and AMD announced in June 2019 that the two would team up to bring mobile GPUs to Samsung Exynos chips, with Samsung System LSI (Samsung Electronics’ Exynos division) licensing AMD’s GP Radeon IP under a multi-contract agreement. years. Yesterday, in presentation for the Exynos 2100, Samsung gave an update on the partnership. Samsung LSI and GM President Dr. Inyup Kang announced, “We are working closely with AMD and will have a next generation mobile GPU on the next flagship product.”
Therefore, an AMD GPU will be coming soon, in the next “flagship product”. Nice. There have been a few different interpretations on the Internet of what “core product” means in this context. Does this mean the next flagship Samsung smartphone or the next flagship Exynos chip? Since Kang works at Samsung LSI, the Exynos division, we will go with the interpretation that “product” means the next Exynos chipset, which will be released a year from now. The other interpretation, that a new GPU would arrive sometime this year on a Galaxy Note, Fold, or whatever you want to interpret as a “flagship smartphone”, would be very unusual, as it would mean killing the new Exynos 2100 less than a year after launch.
Currently, Samsung does not play the full weight of the company behind its own SoC division, instead it divides the worldwide distribution between Exynos and Exynos divisions’ biggest SoC rival, Qualcomm. International users have yet to see what the new Exynos 2100 looks like, but previously, Exynos versions of Samsung phones have been so defamed that Samsung users have filed a petition begging for Qualcomm SoCs to be sold in their territory. For the 2020 Galaxy S20, Samsung also removed the Exynos SoC from its domestic market in South Korea, choosing to ship a Qualcomm chip made in the United States, a move that allegedly “humiliated” the Exynos division.
Along with this deal with AMD, there are some signs that Samsung may be putting a heavier focus on its Exynos SoCs. The motto of yesterday’s presentation was “Exynos is back”, seeming to indicate that Samsung admits that things have gone bad in the past. And today, in the style of Domino’s Pizza, the division is totally sorry and is turning a new page. Last year, the Exynos flagship was the “Exynos 990”, but this year the flagship has a new model number scheme, “Exynos 2100”, apparently closer to the flagship of the Samsung smartphone, the Galaxy S21. Presumably, next year’s AMD-GPU-Packing Exynos will be the Exynos 2200, and it will debut on the Galaxy S22.
But will Samsung ship the Exynos to the rest of the world?
But will that change Samsung’s SoC distribution plan? The problem with any Samsung Exynos news is that it doesn’t apply to about half of Samsung’s user base. Typically, the USA, China, Japan, Latin America and (more recently) Korea receive Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, while Europe, India and the rest of the world receive Exynos. Samsung has not yet indicated that it wants to switch to Exynos everywhere, and that would be a major change in Samsung’s product line, manufacturing capabilities and the SoC market in general.
Meanwhile, a better GPU is not a major attack vector if Samsung wants to go to war with Qualcomm. Qualcomm’s strength lies in its modem technology and connectivity patents, and it has exercised its patent aggressively enough to gain a monopoly over the Android SoC market in places like the US. The two companies are balanced when it comes to CPU technology; both use ready-to-use ARM designs. Today, Samsung uses ready-to-use ARM Mali GPUs, while Qualcomm has its own graphics division called “Adreno”.
Interestingly, with the partnership with Samsung, AMD’s graphics division will be the parent of two of the main GPU implementations in the mobile market. Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs are the result of a marriage to ATI’s former mobile GPU division. Qualcomm and ATI partnered to design Qualcomm’s first Adreno GPUs around 2006, and Qualcomm ended up buying ATI’s mobile “Imageon” group, forming Qualcomm’s internal GPU division. AMD’s graphics division comes from a later purchase of the rest from ATI, giving us AMD Radeon. Today, you can still see a tribute to AMD’s GPU division under Qualcomm’s brand – “Adreno” is an anagram for “Radeon”.