Samsung Exynos with AMD GPU announcement could happen next month
The ARM processor market has definitely gotten more interesting lately after Apple jumped in with guns blazing with its M1 Silicon. Unsurprisingly, rumors point to Google preparing its own "Whitechapel" processor, for one, and Arm itself has just announced its next-gen CPU and GPU cores. However, one of this year's highlights in that space could be Samsung's processor, showing the first visible fruits of its partnership with AMD. That could finally be revealed in a few weeks with the first Exynos with AMD RDNA2 officially debuts.
The two companies have been sprinkling hints and teasers about this particular processor but the most direct confirmation of its existence happened this month. AMD mentioned the next-gen Exynos SoC at this year's Computex 2021 conference that will bear its RDNA2 graphics microarchitecture. This is the same technology used in the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and its latest Radeon RX graphics cards.
Of course, it will most likely scale down the implementation for mobile limitations but it could still give Samsung's Exynos an edge over the competition. Ray tracing and variable rate shading will be the expected buzzwords to make their way to the mobile space thanks to this GPU tech but probably not on the same level as consoles and PCs or even laptops.
In truth, many details are still murky at this point, but we might not have to wait long to hear about some of them officially. Initially believed to be announced this month, Ice universe now points to a July schedule for this still unnamed Exynos + AMD processor.
Exclusive：Samsung×AMD GPU was originally scheduled to be released in June, but now it has been postponed to July, when we will know the performance of AMD GPU on Exynos and other details. pic.twitter.com/GM6W8l3EKY
— ICE UNIVERSE (@UniverseIce) June 20, 2021
Although that puts it just a month before the expected launch of the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3, this new chip won't be appearing on devices that soon. More importantly, it still remains to be seen whether the first device bearing this Samsung and AMD collaboration will actually be a smartphone or if it will be some form of laptop designed to rival Apple's new breed of M1-powered MacBooks.