Samsung has made its own mobile GPU

Samsung has created its first mobile graphics chip, this is basically the first new GPU design in 10 years. At the moment, it's still unknown when Samsung will adopt it for use in its chips and devices, but the South Korean electronics giant claims its GPU delivers leading performance/Watt in simulations. Interestingly, the architecture can be used broadly, not just in smartphones but all the way up to supercomputers.

The design is believed to be taped out and could be adopted by a future Samsung Exynos SoC. It's unknown whether Samsung plans to license the design to third parties.

To hit a new level of performance/watt, the architecture bundles multiple instructions into a group that can be executed in a single cycle. However, it does not use the sorts of VLIW techniques that have fallen out of fashion because they generate other processing overheads.

The design is being led by Chien-Ping Lu, a graphics veteran who started his career at Nvidia designing an integrated graphics chip for PCs. Later, Mediatek hired him to design a mobile GPU. Peddie said the Mediatek design was competitive, but the company decided to continue to use licensed cores from Arm and Imagination Technologies.

Via: EE Times