Samsung Exynos chipsets could soon find a new partner. Well, the South Korean giant is reportedly working a Mobile GPU of its own. The reports emerging from the north claims that during simulations the GPU delivered leading performance/watt. If that is the case, Samsung will be hoping to counter Apple that developed its own A10 Fusion GPU for iPhone X.
Samsung Mobile GPU: What Does That Means?
Even though Samsung makes is own CPU it still has to rely on Mali GPU for graphics. Thus, it decided to come up with a GPU of its own. According to an analyst brief, the Samsung GPU uses a novel architecture which makes it useful for smartphones to supercomputers almost everything.
Jon Peddie Research Principal – Jon Peddie made the revelation on his website. “This is really a big deal — it’s the first new GPU design in 10 years. This design is so good they could deploy it in every platform — it’s a function of their ambition. If I owned it, it would be in everything including cockpits and supercomputers,” he said.
Performance wise, it is expected to be at par with Apple’s GPU. To extract a new level of performance/watt, Samsung is reported to employ architecture that bundles multiple instructions into a group that can be executed in a single cycle.
Samsung’s SGPU project is led by industry veteran Chien-Ping Lu aka CP. As per the unofficial reports, Samsung at its Suwon facilities started working on GPU using VLIW designs which proved to be effective in processing large amounts of data quickly.
More work is being done in Austin and San Jose where Samsung’s innovative design said to be delivering high performance per watt (simulations showed better than expected performance).
Chien-Ping Lu, who designed Nvidia’s integrated graphics chip for PCs and mobile GPU for MediaTek, has joined Samsung which is said to be working on its graphics designs for years now. CP has a number of patents related to GPUs and machine learning on his name and he is also VP of hardware engineering at NovuMind – a startup that’s developing power-efficient AI chips. With him at the helm of Samsung GPU, it could be an advantage to Samsung’s Bixby team.
The news of Samsung building its own GPU has come to light when the virtual rivalry between Samsung and Apple IS at its peak. As per the Internation Data Crop, Samsung is currently in the lead by selling more than 317 million handsets last year. Having said that, Apple post far better numbers in the fourth quarter of the last year with and completing the year with more than 215 million smartphones shipments.
What Does That mean for Qualcomm?
The Samsung in-house developed GPU is expected to make debut alongside it’s Exynos smartphone processor in the times to come. According to Peddie, Samsung is yet to make up its mind on licensing the technology.
However, if Samsung decides to take an aggressive stance with its in-house GPU and decides to license it to other players than it could hurt Qualcomm adversely. Qualcomm is currently the leader in the application processor market. It is also worth mentioning that Samsung currently manufacturer Qualcomm’s top of the line Snapdragon chipset and 5G baseband processors.
