Samsung partners with AMD to bring Radeon graphics to smartphones

RDNA is coming to mobile.

AMD’s graphics technology is already used across consoles and desktop PCs (pictured).

 Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

AMD is licensing its graphics technology to Samsung for use in its future mobile chips. Samsung will pay AMD for access to its newly announced RDNA graphics architecture, and is expected to build it into its own ARM-based Exynos processors. RDNA will also power AMD’s upcoming Navi desktop GPUs.

The deal gives AMD’s graphics tech yet another platform to call home. When most people think of Radeon graphics they think of desktop or laptop graphics cards, but the technology is also used in games consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One, and will also be used in Google’s upcoming cloud gaming service Stadia. Perhaps most surprisingly, AMD’s graphics technology can also be found in certain CPUs produced by its rival Intel.

AMD’s RDNA architecture is likely to replace the ARM-desiged Mali GPUs that Samsung currently uses in its Exynos chips, meaning the technology might not come to every country that Samsung sells its phones in. The South Korean manufacturer tends to release phones with different chipsets in different countries. Most of the world gets access to handsets with its Exynos chips, but in the US, Canada, China, Japan, and Latin America its phones use Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, complete with Adreno-branded GPUs. Interestingly, this graphics technology used to be owned by AMD, before it sold its handset division to Qualcomm in 2009.

Source: Jon Porter|@JonPorty (The Verge).
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