Samsung and AMD announced in June 2019 that the two will work together to bring mobile GPUs to Samsung Exynos chips, with Samsung System LSI (the Exynos division of Samsung Electronics) licensing AMD’s Radeon GPU IP in an agreement with more than a year. Yesterday, Samsung gave an update on the partnership in a presentation for the Exynos 2100. Samsung LSI President and GM Dr. Inyup Kang announced: “We are working with AMD, and we will have a next generation mobile GPU in the next flagship product.”
So an AMD GPU is coming soon in the next ‘flagship product’. Cool. There are different interpretations on the internet of what ‘flagship product’ means in this context. Does this mean the next Samsung smartphone or the next Exynos chip? Since Kang works at Samsung LSI, the Exynos division, we are going with the interpretation that ‘product’ means the next Exynos chipset, which will be a full year from now. The other interpretation, that a new GPU this year somewhere on a Galaxy Note, Fold, or whatever you want to interpret ‘flagship smartphone’, would be very unusual, because it would mean that the new Exynos 2100 is less than a year after launch.
Samsung does not currently throw the full weight of the company behind its own SoC division, but divides the world division between Exynos and the largest SoC competitor of Exynos divisions, Qualcomm. International users have not yet seen what the new Exynos 2100 looks like, but previously the Exynos versions of Samsung phones were so badly damaged that Samsung users started a petition asking for Qualcomm SoCs to be sold in their area. For the 2020 Galaxy S20, Samsung also took the Exynos SoC from its home market in South Korea and preferred to send an American-made Qualcomm chip instead, a step that apparently ‘humiliated’ the Exynos division.
Along with this AMD deal, there are some signs that Samsung may be putting a greater focus on its Exynos SoCs. The motto of yesterday’s presentation was ‘Exynos is back’, which apparently indicates that Samsung acknowledges that things have been bad in the past. And today, according to Domino’s Pizza style, the department is completely sorry about it and is turning a new leaf. Last year, the flagship Exynos was the “Exynos 990”, but this year the flagship has a new model numbering scheme, “Exynos 2100”, which apparently connects it closer to the flagship Samsung smartphone, the Galaxy S21. Presumably next year the AMD GPU Packing Exynos will be the Exynos 2200, and it will debut in the Galaxy S22.
But will Samsung send Exynos to the rest of the world?
But will any of this change Samsung’s SoC distribution plan? The problem with any Samsung Exynos news is that it does not apply to about half of Samsung’s user base. Typically, the US, China, Japan, Latin America and (recently) Korea get Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, while Europe, India and the rest of the world get Exynos. Samsung has not yet indicated that it wants to switch to Exynos everywhere, and this will be a major revolution in Samsung’s product range, manufacturing capability and in the SoC market in general.
Meanwhile, a better GPU is not an excellent attack vector if Samsung wants to go to war with Qualcomm after the SoC war. Qualcomm’s strong point is the modem technology and connectivity patents, and he applied his patent aggressively enough to give himself a monopoly on the Android SoC market in places like the US. The two enterprises are even in terms of CPU technology; they both use ARM designs off the shelf. Samsung currently uses off-the-shelf ARM Mali GPUs, while Qualcomm has its own graphics division called ‘Adreno’.
Interestingly, with the Samsung partnership, AMD’s graphics division will be the progenitor of two of the most important GPU implementations in the mobile market. Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs are the result of a marriage to ATI’s old mobile GPU division. Qualcomm and ATI worked together to design Qualcomm’s first Adreno GPUs around 2006, and Qualcomm eventually bought the ATI mobile “Imageon” group straight away and formed Qualcomm’s internal GPU division. AMD’s graphics division comes from a later purchase of the rest from ATI, which gives us AMD Radeon. Today, you can still see a tribute to AMD’s GPU division in Qualcomm’s brand – ‘Adreno’ is an anagram of ‘Radeon’.