Samsung and AMD partner to utilise Radeon graphics technology on smartphones

Computex 2019 may be over, but AMD is still making headlines for its graphics, only this time it's for smartphones. Advanced Micro Device recently saw its share rise by 7-percent after announcing a multi-year strategic partnership with Samsung Electronics for Radeon graphics on smartphones.

Samsung currently has its own Exynos range of custom CPUs for its smartphones. For the GPU, Samsung has exclusively relied on designs from ARM. According to recent rumours, the South Korean tech giant was focused on ditching ARM to create its own mobile graphics. But designing GPUs from scratch can be difficult. You only have to look to the Exynos range that still struggles to keep pace with Qualcomm.

Samsung's partnership with AMD has emerged as a more practical alternative to developing GPUs in-house. Now, this doesn't mean AMD is going to be shoving in RX Vega cards into something small enough to fit in a pocket, but it does appear AMD will be licencing some of its graphics technologies for Samsung for use in its smartphones.

The announcement pointed to a multi-year partnership, which means that the agreement isn't just for one chip and will likely be a four to a five-year deal. The aim is to create performance oriented, low powered mobile graphics based on AMD's Radeon graphics technologies.

AMD has also confirmed that the technology for the new mobile GPUs will be based on AMD's recently announced RDNA graphics architecture – A technology which is supposed to scale very well between devices.

The new partnership comes as excellent news for AMD and would undoubtedly give the chipmaker a significant boost in its quest to dethrone Nvidia in the GPU market.

In an official statement, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su said: "Adoption of our Radeon graphics technologies across the PC, game console, cloud and HPC markets has grown significantly, and we are thrilled to now partner with industry leader Samsung to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market. This strategic partnership will extend the reach of our high-performance Radeon graphics into the mobile market, significantly expanding the Radeon user base and development ecosystem."