A few years ago, Samsung announced a partnership with AMD to integrate its GPU technology into the company’s own in-house Exynos chipsets.
This led to the introduction of XClipse GPUs based on AMD’s RDNA architecture for the Exynos 2200 and afterward. They have even trickled down to the midrange Exynos 1480 chipset on the recently introduced Galaxy A55 5G.
After introducing the Exynos 1480, it might seem that Samsung is continuing its partnership with AMD for custom GPUs. However, a new report indicates this might be far from the truth.
According to a usually very accurate leaker, Roland Quandt (@rquandt on X/Twitter), it has been reported that the upcoming Exynos 2500 will be the company’s last chipset with AMD’s GPU since it seems that Samsung is moving on from the AMD partnership (via @OreXda on X/Twitter) to build its own in-house custom GPU for the Exynos 2600.
If true, this will be the first in-house GPU directly from Samsung’s semiconductor division, with the company controlling the design, architecture, and manufacturing technology.
This move may be due to the AMD partnership not panning out as expected regarding the GPU’s performance. For instance, the debutant XClipse 920 GPU within the Exynos 2200 wasn’t as good as the Adreno 730 GPU within the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
There were a few signs of improvements recently, with the XClipse 940 GPU of the Exynos 2400 (on the Galaxy S24/S24+) outperforming the Adreno 750 GPU within the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 by a very slight margin in raw performance benchmarks.
Unfortunately, this new GPU breakthrough has not translated into better gaming performance for the Exynos 2400 compared to the 8 Gen 3, with the Exynos’ GPU severely lacking better support for its capabilities from game developers.
As Samsung heads into the era of making its custom GPUs, it must be careful not to tread down the path of its prior Mongoose in-house CPU cores: the power-hungry Mongoose M7 cores used in the Exynos 990 were responsible for the chipset’s multitude of thermal and efficiency issues.
Here’s hoping the company gets its custom GPU right, but there is still a long time ahead before we see it on Samsung phones in the real world.
