AMD Licensing RDNA Graphics IP To Samsung For Smartphones & More

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Licensing RDNA Graphics IP To Samsung For Smartphones & More

AMD today announced a new licensing deal with Samsung around low-power, high-performance graphics technologies...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Samsung-RDNA-License

[cb88]

This sounds more like an IP block license where Samsung does nearly zero engineering just drag and drop it in they can probably configure how many CUs and if it has various sub units such as VCE etc... and such on their end but it should just be a plain AMD device sitting among the devices attached to the CPUs... typically companies doing this don't even get acess to all of the hardware design files just some netlists and enough VHDL or verilog to make it configurable.

[sykobee]

Very interesting, and unexpected, news.

Samsung giving up with ARM's Mali?

[WolfpackN64]

We're finally going to get mobile chipsets with decent graphics performance and open source drivers!

[schmidtbag]

We're finally going to get mobile chipsets with decent graphics performance and open source drivers!

Hopefully anyway. But if so, this is pretty exciting. Samsung's ARM CPUs have always been pretty solid in performance, it's just the Mali GPU has always been a major turnoff. If the RDNA-based GPU they're using is similar enough to AMD's other stuff that the open-source drivers work with them, that could be a huge win.

[Danielsan]

Sorry for the ignorance but what does it mean "graphics IP based" ?

[WolfpackN64]

Hopefully anyway. But if so, this is pretty exciting. Samsung's ARM CPUs have always been pretty solid in performance, it's just the Mali GPU has always been a major turnoff. If the RDNA-based GPU they're using is similar enough to AMD's other stuff that the open-source drivers work with them, that could be a huge win.

I might just buy a Samsung phone for an RDNA GPU inside an Exynos SoC (depending on other factors of course, I'm not insane). It does make me wonder if Samsung has other plans with their Mongoose cores and AMD GPU combination then smartphones.

[WolfpackN64]

Sorry for the ignorance but what does it mean "graphics IP based" ?

Probably just AMD's RDNA architecture GPU, but cut down to Samsung's liking to fit it inside an Exynos SoC.

[DrYak]

Sorry for the ignorance but what does it mean "graphics IP based" ?

IP = Intellectual Property.

AMD is giving licenses to GPU core (those cores will be based on the same cores as RDNA).

Basically as cb88 has written above, Samsung is getting the tools and license so they can copy-paste an AMD Randon into their next Exynos smartphone/tablet chipset.

As long as they don't fuck up to much, that means finally a semi-decent and recent chipset (Librem 5's FreeScale imx 8, I'm looking at you !) whose GPU part works out of the box with upstream kernel drivers, instead of needing some proprietary blob (unlike most GPU paired with ARM which currently require reverse engineering efforts like Freedreno, Panfrost, etc.)

[starshipeleven]

Sorry for the ignorance but what does it mean "graphics IP based" ?

It's "custom graphics IP, based on blablabla"

IP is "intellectual property" and in this case is used to identify the blueprints or schematics to build something.

Samsung has bought a license to use an AMD custom design of scalable GPUs. That's some serious cash for AMD right there if this design becomes the default GPU in Samsung hardware.