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496911-samsung-galaxy-s7

Samsung and Apple tree are the two titans of the smartphone industry, simply they've taken very dissimilar routes to become there. Where Apple has invested a great deal of fourth dimension and money into building its own custom SoCs and designing its ain microarchitecture, Samsung has historically used cores from many other companies, including Texas Instruments and Qualcomm. Last year, the company announced it would bring its first custom CPU core to marketplace in 2016. At present, it'south reportedly in talks with both AMD and Nvidia, looking for a graphics core to match its custom CPU.

Nosotros've heard rumors of Samsung wanting a custom GPU cadre before, but zippo concrete has come of information technology thus far. Information technology'due south hard to find good data on recent smartphone GPU market share, but this graph past Jon Peddie Inquiry shows the lay of the land from 2 years ago.

GPUMarketShare1

Given that Intel and Vivante are both out of the game (Vivante seems to have pivoted to focus on embedded and IoT), the major players here are Imagination Technologies (Apple'due south preferred partner) and Qualcomm. Both Nvidia and AMD have graphics IP that Samsung could license — the key question is, is Samsung just looking to cutting a bargain that gives them access to sure patents then they can legally roll their own solution, or practise they want a office that'due south designed past either AMD or Nvidia?

It'due south not actually clear which visitor would be the amend fit. Nvidia manufacturers one of the best Android tablets yous can buy, just recently canceled its plans to upgrade the Shield tablet. It's been speculated that this might accept been due to pressure from Nintendo and its upcoming NX. Nvidia is believed to have won that design and may take been prevented from bringing a competitor product to market. Over the last few years Nvidia has focused much more on automotive and deep learning than on launching mobile products.

AMD famously sold its mobile IP to Qualcomm, who created Adreno. In that location's no reason Team Ruddy couldn't build a new low-power GPU, and the company's focus on embedded and semicustom pattern makes it a expert fit for Samsung. CEO Lisa Su has also talked near wanting to lean more on AMD's patent portfolio while edifice out boosted semi-custom wins. The question is whether AMD has the manpower or current resources to design something in-house. GCN isn't known for existence a low-power GPU compages, afterward all, and AMD already has enough to keep it decorated with Microsoft's Scorpio, Vega, and Zen all dropping in 2017.

Samsung-8890-1

Speaking of Samsung's M1, Anandtech got a wait at the architecture during Hot Chips 2016. The flake is an out-of-club pattern capable of decoding four instructions per bike and with a perceptron-based co-operative predictor. This last isn't a brand-new characteristic, but companies are often cagey well-nigh the exact details of how they implement co-operative prediction in silicon.

Samsung8890Perf

Above, we run into Samsung'southward M1 performance every bit compared with a Cortex-A57, admitting one clocked 200MHz beneath the Samsung bit. Operation is fairly good, fifty-fifty if the bit actually only distinguishes itself in a few tests. Every bit a first effort, it'southward a solid cadre. If Samsung wants to pair it with a GPU of their own blueprint, AMD and Nvidia are the companies to talk to. It could take several years to bring a new solution to market. But if Samsung wants Apple-like control over its own production lines, creating new GPU and CPU IP is the way to practice information technology.