| Pemalite said: AMD and Samsung just made a deal public. Samsung may now be leveraging AMD's graphics for it's Exynos chips in the future. This could get interesting, especially if AMD can adopt some technologies to make it's PC GPU's more efficient... Just like how nVidia took what it learned with Tegra and baked it into Maxwell. |
Finally, this means that a modern Android phone will have good graphics drivers!
As far as making GPUs "more efficient" is concerned, nah Samsung will probably just accept the architecture as is because one of the biggest benefits of AMD hardware is down to how easy it is to make high quality drivers for it and AMD is a testament to this considering their previously spotty track record ... (their GL drivers were unusable pre-GCN)
Samsung will probably just down clock them if they have to get a higher efficiency curve when the other players are a non-starter ...
Nvidia aren't interested in doing semi-custom plus given their poor history with past customers they must find Nvidia to have very egregious licensing terms. Nobody goes to Qualcomm for their graphics technology so they only exist to prop up their baseband technology such as LTE/5G modems or RF front-end modules and they have tons of anti-trust issues so Samsung probably just wants dump Qualcomm altogether once they roll out their own 5G modems. It's clear that both Nvidia and Qualcomm poses too many conflicts of interests to be of interest to be reliable suppliers for their customers ...
Similarly, nobody goes to ARM specifically for their GPUs but to license their CPU technology instead and PowerVR is irrelevant in today's world without Apple being their customer. When half (Nvidia/Qualcomm) of the potential suppliers are acting in bad faith and 3 out of 4 of them (ARM/PowerVR/Qualcomm) have bad drivers then an outside alternative (AMD) by comparison are licensing their designs for chum change while providing good drivers as well makes it an easy decision!
It'll be interesting to see AMD deploying Android graphics drivers and see the quality of their implementation comparison to other godforsaken mobile graphics hardware vendors. Will be extremely curious if AMD will also provide OpenGL ES drivers which are far easier make compared to regular OpenGL or if they'll just use a translation layer in place like ANGLE ...
