Samsung Said To Be Eying AMD, NVIDIA GPU Tech For Future Exynos Mobile Processors

Sometimes, it's best to accept the fact that you can't do everything yourself, and where microprocessors are concerned, that can be critical. Sometimes there's just no sense in reinventing the wheel. However, Samsung has been driving to build in-house graphics IP for its Exynos mobile chipsets for quite some time. According to new rumors, though, the Korean company has put that idea on hold, and is instead considering licensing GPU IP from other major players like AMD and / or NVIDIA.

According to industry sources at SamMobile, Samsung is in talks with both AMD and NVIDIA to license their respective technologies, although it's unclear at this point if deals with both would actually happen. It's likely that Samsung would ultimately decide on one vendor and go with that. Doing so could save the company an enormous amount of R&D hassle and perhaps even give Exynos a big boost in the graphics department.

At this point, it's hard to wager whether it'd be AMD or NVIDIA that Samsung would end up going with, but there is something to be said about AMD, which has seen success by appearing in the current-gen consoles, including the upcoming PS4 Pro, where it managed to pack 4.2 TFLOPs of graphics horsepower into the confined form-factor. Then again, NVIDIA has been successfully integrating its own graphics IP in its low power, mobile-optimized Tegra SoCs for a long time as well. 

Owing credence again to AMD in this rumbling, however, is the fact that Samsung is looking to release an Exynos chipset next year with HSA (heterogenous system architecture), which would allow both the GPU and CPU to feed off of the same system memory pool - something else AMD already has some great experience with.

Regardless, the future of Samsung's Exynos could be very exciting if these rumored plans bear fruit some day.