Samsung and AMD Announce Multi-Year Strategic Graphics IP Licensing Deal For SLSI Mobile GPUs

Samsung and AMD announced today a new multi-year strategic partnership between the two companies, where Samsung SLSI will license graphics IP from AMD for use in mobile GPUs. From a report: The announcement is a major disruptive move for the mobile graphics landscape as it signifies that Samsung is going forward with the productization of their own in-house GPU architecture in future Exynos chipsets. Samsung is said to have started work on their own 'S-GPU' at its research division back around in 2012, with the company handing over the new IP to a new division called 'ACL,' or Advanced Computing Lab in San Jose, which has a joint charter with SARC (Samsung Austin R&D Center, where Samsung currently designs its custom mobile CPU & memory controller IP). With today's announced partnership, Samsung will license 'custom graphics IP' from AMD. What this IP means is a bit unclear from the press release, but we have some strong pointers on what it might be.

Samsung's own GPU architecture is already quite far along, having seen 7 years of development, and already being integrated in test silicon chipsets. Unless the deal was signed years ago and only publicly announced today, it would signify that the IP being talked about now is a patent-deal, rather than new architectural IP from AMD that Samsung would integrate in their own designs. Samsung's new GPU IP is the first from-scratch design in over a decade, in an industry with very old incumbents with massive patent-pools. Thus what today's announcement likely means is likely that Samsung is buying a patent-chest from AMD in order to protect themselves from possible litigation from other industry players.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.