Samsung plans to use AMD graphics architecture in next-gen Exynos chips for smartphones, tablets, or other mobile devices.

The two companies first announced a licensing deal in 2019 and released the first Samsung Exynos chip with an AMD GPU in 2022. So far that chip is the only Samsung processor to feature AMD graphics. But Samsung and AMD have extended their multi-year licensing agreement, indicating that new Exynos + AMD processors are on the way.

The Exynos 2200 processor with an RDNA 2-based Xclipse GPU is the first (and only) Samsung chip to date to ship with AMD graphics

The announcement is pretty light on details, but the companies say the plan is to “bring console-level graphics quality and optimized power consumption to more mobile devices.”

It wouldn’t really take much to meet that “more devices” promise. So far Samsung has only released a single chip with AMD graphics: the Exynos 2200 chip with an Xclipse GPU based on AMD RDNA 2 architecture that brought support for ray tracing and variable rate shading to the Samsung Galaxy S22.

But the chip wasn’t particularly popular, and by the time Samsung was ready to ship the Galaxy S23 the company opted to use Qualcomm chips for all models, without offering any versions of the phone powered by Exynos chips.

In other words, if Samsung manages to release one new chip with AMD graphics, it will double the number of processor designs that came out of the licensing agreement the two companies first signed in 2019.

While Samsung isn’t ready to announce when we’ll see a new chip with AMD graphics or which generation of AMD graphics that chip will use, AnandTech’s Ryan Smith makes an educated guess that any Exynos + AMD chip released in the next 18 months would likely feature RDNA 3 graphics, while processors released later than that could feature RDNA 4 graphics.

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3 replies on “Samsung and AMD extend deal to bring “console-level graphics” to mobile devices”

  1. Would be cool if they make a chip aimed at Windows on ARM to maybe make that worth buying assuming more apps and games get ported over and/or x86 emulation/translation improves a lot. Right now, Windows on ARM isn’t great.

    Or Intel/AMD get back into targeting very efficient and very low power SoCs.

  2. While I’ve read the first chip’s graphics wasn’t much better, if any, than competitors, I hope the next one would have major improvements. Definitely sounds promising.

  3. Let’s see if they’re going to experiment with their Exynos nonsense in Europe (EMEA, more accurately) only, again. It’s possible that they are still not quite done with RDNA2 anyway, if the rumour (from Tech_Reve on Twitter) about a 4nm shrunk Exynos 2200 for the S23FE will turn out to be correct.

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