Two years after announcing plans to bring AMD graphics to Samsung Exynos mobile chips, it looks like the first of those chips could be ready to launch soon.

During a Computex keynote, AMD’s Lisa Su said that Samsung’s “next flagship” mobile system-on-a-chip would feature custom graphics from AMD featuring the company’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture.

What does that means for mobile devices powered by the chip? The kind of graphics horsepower that had usually been associated with discrete GPUs.

Su says that the upcoming Exynos chip will support features including ray tracking and variable rate shading. While that wouldn’t make it the first ARM-based chip with those features (Apple’s M1 processor also supports ray tracing), it could still be enough to help give Samsung an edge over rival Qualcomm.

Samsung’s recent processors have had GPUs based on ARM’s Mali designs, while Qualcomm uses its own Adreno graphics technology, which often outperforms ARM’s designs.

While it’s unclear exactly when Samsung’s Exynos-with-AMD chips will be ready to ship, Su said that Samsung will be sharing more details later this year.

It’s also not entirely clear exactly which Samsung devices will use the new chips. Samsung’s highest-profile mobile devices are certainly its smartphones. But the company also sells a line of high-end tablets as well as Chromebooks and Windows laptops, and there have been some reports suggesting that at least one of Samsung’s upcoming Exynos/AMD devices would be a Windows PC.

via AMD (press release) (YouTube)

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2 replies on “Samsung Exynos chip with AMD graphics to bring ray-tracing to mobile”

  1. Many professionals waiting the dethroning of x86 and the ARM on windows domination. That is the only way to go as laptop battery’s have those size restictions and the battery technology for mobile devices is stationary for many years. Let’s home that this ARM processor will be the equivalent of M1 in terms of performance.

  2. I’m actually excited about the idea of this and AMD Ryzen APUs with RDNA2. I have believed for some time that ARM architecture is the way forward for tablets and <13 in thin & light laptops. For larger laptops the only real disappointment with Ryzen 5000 was the continued reliance on Vega graphics. IMHO Vega should have been retired before Ryzen 4000 APUs hit the market. At this point AMD is beating a dead horse. Hopefully AMD 6000 series APUs will have RDNA2 as rumoured.

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