Mobile AMD and Samsung's GPU Licensing Deal: A New Era of Collaboration?

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Back on Monday we saw the surprise announcement from AMD and Samsung revealing a multi-year strategic partnership in which Samsung will license AMD’s graphics IP. Since the announcement, we’ve been working to reach out to sources to try to dig a bit deeper into just what the deal entails. While it seems like AMD and Samsung are holding their most important cards close to their proverbial chest, we’ve managed to find some new high-level details of the deal, and how it looks like AMD and Samsung are setting up for a rather unique collaborative arrangement.

Perhaps the biggest outstanding question is just how the licensing arrangement works – what exactly has Samsung licensed? It’s also the trickiest question, and the one that our sources have been the least willing to talk about. So we're going to put a pin in that for the moment, so that we can talk about another few points first.

Samsung Goes “Next Gen” In 2022+ (or later)
Instead, let’s start with GPU architectures and the timing of the deal, since these factors are closely intertwined. We’ve known for some time now that Samsung has been working on their own GPU design, making it so far as to producing test chips on 10nm and 7nm. While we don’t have detailed information, it does look that things haven’t been progressing quite as fast as Samsung had hoped.

From all perspectives, it looks like this AMD/Samsung deal was only more recently finalized, and that the two companies are just at the start of their partnership. In particular, Samsung's VP of GPU development seems to have only a few days ago changed his employment status as no longer being with the company, which is one of a few indicators we're aware of that Samsung only recently changed strategies.

This also means that whatever Samsung started working on, it’s going to take some time to bring it to market. Even if this is a crash program – and to be clear, we don’t get that impression here – it will still take Samsung some time to integrate AMD’s GPU IP and tune it for SoC performance and power levels. That would seem to be a minimum of two years, if not longer, so we’re not expecting to see Radeon-powered Samsung SoCs any sooner than 2022.

The timing also points out that that this would be a future AMD GPU architecture that Samsung will be working with, rather than something that contemporary to AMD’s current products. While AMD is currently ramping up production of GPUs based on the Navi architecture, and these are going to hit the market in July, we have to keep in mind that these designs were probably locked in 2 years ago.

As such, for the 2022 product time frame, it means that Navi would already be four to five years old by the time Samsung’s first SoC ships. So, while our sources have confirmed that Samsung is using a GPU architecture on AMD’s public roadmap, it’s apparently not Navi. 

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