AMD and Samsung Announce Strategic Partnership in Mobile IP

del42sa

Regular
AMD unveiled RDNA, the next foundational gaming architecture that was designed to drive the future of PC gaming, console, and cloud for years to come. With a new compute unit10 design, RDNA is expected to deliver incredible performance, power and memory efficiency in a smaller package compared to the previous generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. It is projected to provide up to 1.25X higher performance-per-clock11 and up to 1.5X higher performance-per-watt over GCN12, enabling better gaming performance at lower power and reduced latency.

https://www.amd.com/en/press-releas...ce-strategic-partnership-ultra-low-power-high

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Samsung-RDNA-License

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.

good catch, isn´t it ?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I wonder whether we're talking about a couple of flagship large smartphones, or the majority of Samsung's lineup. In the latter case, it would be a really big win for AMD, and a completely unexpected one—well, I wasn't expecting it, at least.
 
AMD back into mobile market ? Didn't they sold their "mobile" division/tech, Imageon, to Qualcomm years ago ?
 
Is this putting an end to rumors of Samsung developing their own GPU?

It was certainly a surprise though. Samsung has been trying to get GPU performance parity with Qualcomm for years especially for their flagships shipping outside the US, and with ARM they've never been successful at it.

I wonder whether we're talking about a couple of flagship large smartphones, or the majority of Samsung's lineup. In the latter case, it would be a really big win for AMD, and a completely unexpected one—well, I wasn't expecting it, at least.

Actually in Samsung's case the flagships (Galaxy S line) are the ones that get better sales numbers by far, so it's a really big win nonetheless.
 
When AMD sold Adreno to Qualcomm, wasn't there a provision in the contract barring AMD from competing in the mobile GPU market? Adreno was sold i january 2009, so maybe it was just a ten year moratorium, - which is now expired.

Cheers
 
Is this putting an end to rumors of Samsung developing their own GPU?.
It's not a rumour when they openly boast about it: https://samsungsemiconductor-us.com/labs/labs/austinrd.html

"The San Jose Advanced Computing Lab (ACL) was opened in 2017 and GPU IP (leveraging 5 years initial development from another division) was added to the joint charter."

Anyway I'm a bit confused as where Samsung GPU ends and AMD IP starts, but it looks like something akin to what Apple is doing with IMG licenses.
 
Anyway I'm a bit confused as where Samsung GPU ends and AMD IP starts, but it looks like something akin to what Apple is doing with IMG licenses.
Does it need to be the same GPU?
Couldn't they be using Radeon for the higher-end SoCs and their own architecture for lower-end ones, in order to cut away from Mali graphics for good?
AMD's IP should be a much more proven architecture than Samsung's in-house one, and in case the later underperforms it wouldn't be such a big problem to include it into a lower-end exynos for lower margin devices.
 
Or not.
Probably not.
Probably yes.
Does it need to be the same GPU?
Couldn't they be using Radeon for the higher-end SoCs and their own architecture for lower-end ones, in order to cut away from Mali graphics for good?
AMD's IP should be a much more proven architecture than Samsung's in-house one, and in case the later underperforms it wouldn't be such a big problem to include it into a lower-end exynos for lower margin devices.
I don't think they have the man-power for two GPU designs.

It looks likely this deal happened 3 years ago and is merely just made public today.
 
Samsung is pushing hard in the Automtive industry. One of the more common complaints however was the GPU on their SoCs is a bit behind when compared to the NVIDIA Xavier and Parker.
You have to consider that in Automotive the power envelope while generally not so high as desktop is much higher than smartphone and tablets.
One of the things that immediately comes to my mind is the integration of compute oriented architecture of AMD's Radeon in Samsung's Exynos Auto.
The requirement for compute power in Automotive is growing exponentially due to ADAS and Autonomous vehicles running a wide variety of inferencing and DNN algorithms and NVIDIA is quite strong in this area with their Tegra SoCs.
And it would not make sense for Samsung to license it from the competitor NVIDIA who is making Tegra SoCs for the GPU.
Couple this to the fact that AMD has a strong open source drivers and a budding compute stack it could be something to watch out.
You can guess who is the only closed source GPU vendor. Intel has massive open source components and DNN/compute stack as well.
 
I don't think they have the man-power for two GPU designs.

In 2018 alone Samsung SLSI launched one SoC with a Mali G71 MP1, one with a Mali G71-MP2, one with a Mali G72 MP3, one with a Mali G72 MP18 and a supposed die-shrink with a Mali T720.
In their ARMv7 days, they'd release SoCs with Mali and PowerVR GPUs in parallel.

The team adapting AMD's Radeon IP GPU to their SoC could be a different team than the one working on their in-house GPU.

Besides, if Samsung's in-house GPU started being developed 7 years ago and so far we haven't seen in live, there's a chance the architecture is in development hell and Samsung is killing it off.


Samsung is pushing hard in the Automtive industry. One of the more common complaints however was the GPU on their SoCs is a bit behind when compared to the NVIDIA Xavier and Parker.
You have to consider that in Automotive the power envelope while generally not so high as desktop is much higher than smartphone and tablets.
One of the things that immediately comes to my mind is the integration of compute oriented architecture of AMD's Radeon in Samsung's Exynos Auto.
The announcement specifically states it's for the mobile market.
 
The team adapting AMD's Radeon IP GPU to their SoC could be a different team than the one working on their in-house GPU.
Why would they bother with this licensing deal assuming their in-house stuff is anywhere decent?
Valhall seems decent, too.
 
Or Intel. They licensed from both Nvidia and AMD. Doesn't mean much w.r.t. their internal teams. Sometimes IP is just "don't sue me" shielding.

Intel licensing IP from nvidia and AMD to produce their Gen GPUs was announced as a license agreement. No architecture nor specific GPU naming was given, as it's probably just Intel buying the rights to cover general patents like "shader processors".

This announcement carries a completely different language. Specifically "Radeon" and "RDNA" are named:

AMD said:
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.


I know @Nebuchadnezzar knows a whole lot more than us mortals regarding this market, but it really doesn't look like this is a case where Samsung negotiated with AMD a patenting deal 3 years ago and it's announcing it only now.
If this is not Samsung implementing a scaled-down Navi in their SoCs, then the language used is very deceptive, to say the least.


Funny thing is this is something nvidia set out to do 6 years ago, but has been unsuccesful so far.
 
Back
Top