Samsung / AMD / Ron Amadeo
Samsung Electronics and AMD extend smartphone chip contract. In today’s press release, the companies “signed a multi-year agreement extension to bring multi-generation high-performance, ultra-low-power AMD Radeon graphics solutions to the expanded portfolio of Samsung Exynos SoCs.” Even Samsung is reluctant to use Samsung chips these days, so it’s not clear which devices will feature these AMD GPUs.
Samsung’s chip division and AMD have already delivered a generation of Exynos SoCs powered by AMD GPUs. That chip was his Exynos 2200 with the “Samsung Xclipse 920 GPU” co-developed by AMD. Samsung’s phone division, which isn’t necessarily biased toward products in the chip division, has shipped its chips in the S22 in some regions such as Europe, while others such as the US and China have his own with Qualcomm chips. We shipped the S22. Exynos chips have a bad reputation for consistently underperforming Qualcomm chips, and the Exynos 2200 was no exception. The chip performed poorly against the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in benchmarks and power usage, leaving Samsung fans to once again have to deal with getting an “inferior phone” depending on which country they live in. did not.
Where the Xclipse GPU beat Qualcomm was in ray tracing. In his four-paragraph press release today, Samsung and AMD said, “Xclipse was the industry’s first mobile GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing,” he points out twice. Samsung’s 2022 chip has better ray tracing than Qualcomm’s 2023 chip. The problem is that being an early adopter of ray tracing doesn’t have much to do with mobile games. Mobile games are built for causal audiences and targeted for mass market hardware. That market doesn’t value high graphics fidelity because it has to balance battery life. Attempts to bring hardcore gaming value to smartphones didn’t find much of an audience, as evidenced by Lenovo’s termination of its gaming line of smartphones.
Samsung’s chip division has branded these Exynos chips to match phones in Samsung’s phone division, but the two groups disagree about the chips’ market viability. Only a few of the Galaxy S22s shipped with the Exynos 2200 chip, while the Galaxy S23 skipped the Exynos 2300 entirely and went all Qualcomm in all regions. and may debut in a special ‘Fan Edition’ of Samsung products. Both Exynos and AMD are sticking to their association with smartphones, and it’s not clear if this partnership has any customers.
The move to bring Radeon graphics to the “extended portfolio of Samsung Exynos SoCs” could result in some design wins for the two companies. Samsung’s phone division still ships Exynos chips in mid- and low-end devices, so that’s probably where we’ll see Radeon tech hit the market. It doesn’t make much sense to bring it to the , but both companies are probably hungry for all sorts of market share.
