Samsung spends a lot on research and development. Some even say no phone maker spends as much as it does. A few years ago it was rumored that Samsung was working on its own GPU which would show up in its flagship phones this year or next.
Although Samsung wasn’t able to achieve that with the Galaxy S8, new info says that it has now developed the GPU which is called S-GPU. S-GPU is rumored to appear in next year’s flagship processor. The info comes from leakster @IceUniverse who posted it on Weibo.
Samsung already makes its own custom cores for the Exynos chipsets. The Exynos 8895 present in the Galaxy S8 and S8+ for instance is made up of four 2nd gen custom CPU cores and four power efficient Cortex-A53 cores. Samsung licensed the ARMv8 ISA from ARM to design and build the micro-architecture for the custom cores from scratch.
While no details have not been provided yet about S-GPU, it was mentioned last year that NVIDIA and AMD are two companies that have mobile graphics IP Samsung could license. NVIDIA makes one of the best GPUs and that is evident from its SHIELD Tablet and SHIELD TV.
READ MORE: Samsung’s Exynos 7872 Will Have Mali-G71 MP1 GPU
AMD on the other hand sold its mobile graphics IP to Qualcomm which is the famous Adreno GPU that powers its mobile platforms. It may have another mobile graphics IP that is available to license to Samsung. Bottom line is if Samsung’s S-GPU is based on graphics IP from any of these two companies, the Adreno GPU may have found its match.
