fatslob-:O said:
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) |
The license agreement seems to stipulate that the I.P sharing goes both ways.
In Samsungs case it's probably extremely valuable as it gives access to AMD's entire warchest of graphics I.P that dates back decades.
As for GL drivers and AMD, they have certainly have had rough patches... And certainly trailed nVidia at certain points, but starting with R300, I never had to many issues overall with OpenGL on ATI/AMD Graphics... And once the frame pacing driver came out for Terascale/GCN... AMD's drivers were extremely solid.
| fatslob-:O said: Samsung will probably just down clock them if they have to get a higher efficiency curve when the other players are a non-starter ... |
We don't know the extent of how Samsung is going to leverage AMD's patents, Samsung has been working on a GPU for Exynos for the good part of 7+ years, whether they threw that design out and adopted AMD's remains to be seen or if Samsung is just licensing AMD's patents to protect themselves, who knows.
End of the day though... If you are in North America, this means little anyway as Samsung generally leverages Snapdragon in that territory anyway.
| fatslob-:O said: 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 ... |
nVidia doesn't get design wins in mobile phones, they are irrelevant in the mobile phone space.
In saying that... Qualcomm leverages Radeon technology anyway... Samsung+Qualcomm means that AMD will have the bulk of the high-end/mid-range smartphone locked up using their graphics technology... Granted Adreno has deviated from more modern AMD architectures, there is still some fundamental similarities at various levels. Remember... Re-arrange the letters of Adreno and it spells out Radeon.
| fatslob-:O said: 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! |
Allwinner and Mediatek tend to have the low-end locked up, they tend to opt for PowerVR and Mali, seems that PowerVR has been getting the preference over Mali these days though.
Maybe ARM might reduce their emphasis on developing their own graphics I.P?
| fatslob-:O said: 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 ... |
I think it is to soon to jump the gun and assume AMD will be building drivers for Android. They may leave that up to Samsung.
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