It had been rumored for a long time that Samsung might work with AMD on a custom mobile GPU. Nothing has come of it as yet but Samsung did take everyone by surprise in June 2019.
The company announced that it had entered into a strategic partnership with AMD to bring the latter's high-performance Radeon graphics to mobile processors. At today's Exynos On 2021 event for the Exynos 2100, Samsung revealed a bit more information about its custom GPU plans.
Samsung and AMD have been working on it for two years
Dr. Inyup Kang, president of Samsung's System LSI Business, confirmed during the event that Samsung is working with AMD to produce a “next generation mobile GPU” that will be launched “in the next flagship product.”
That's all that Kang had to say on the topic. While it doesn't answer many of the questions that we have about this Samsung and AMD partnership, it does confirm that we'll get to see this new GPU in the near future.
Exactly what Kang meant by “next flagship product” remains a mystery. Is the GPU going to be introduced with the Galaxy Note 21? Let's not forget that there are rumors about the Galaxy Note series being discontinued this year. Could the flagship he was referring to be the Galaxy Z Fold 3?
What matters more is the performance that this GPU will be able to provide. With Samsung moving away from custom CPU cores for its Exynos chipsets, a powerful custom GPU just might be the saving grace for the Exynos project.
It was rumored late last year that the high-end chipset with AMD graphics currently in development at Samsung won't be launched until 2022. If that is the case, perhaps we may have to wait until the Galaxy S22 to see what these two companies have cooked up.
