Samsung Exynos + AMD Radeon reveal pushed back to July, leaks show off Mali-beating performance

[Molematt]

Highly anticipated: The AMD and Samsung partnership to bring Radeon graphics to a mobile SoC, two years in the making, is at last close to bearing fruit. While established mobile leaker Ice Universe claims that the product's release has been pushed back to July, rumors suggest it's more than capable of taking on current and upcoming Mali GPUs.

The plans for a Samsung SoC featuring Radeon graphics been talked about aplenty since the initial reveal in 2019, but it’s back in the limelight after AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su brought it up during her Computex 2021 keynote.

According to Ice Universe, the Exynos + Radeon collaboration was due for release this month, but it’s been pushed to July. However, samples are already in hand of partners and in the testing phase. If posts on Korean forum Clien are to be believed, the SoC is showing strong results against competitors after having beaten Apple's A14 Bionic earlier this year.

Exclusive：Samsung×AMD GPU was originally scheduled to be released in June, but now it has been postponed to July, when we will know the performance of AMD GPU on Exynos and other details. pic.twitter.com/GM6W8l3EKY

— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) June 20, 2021

The Clien thread's OP claims that, at peak performance, the mobile RDNA2 GPU was able to narrowly beat out Arm’s next-generation Mali GPU. It also saw harsher throttling than expected after initial rounds of testing, dropping about 20% performance after the first test and then 30% after the second -- but even when throttled this badly, the mRDNA2 GPU was allegedly still able to beat out the current top end Mali GPU (presumably the Mali-G78, unveiled last year).

The forum posts also allege that results are good enough that Samsung are abandoning their own GPU development efforts, and that Google has been eyeing up the collaboration and may have signed up as a customer.

News about AMD mRDNA2 peak/overall performance

OP https://t.co/6oPzcup7dP

The rumor of which mRDNA2 is set to be equipped in the next Exynos is overwhelming the competitor chip in peak performance, according to an actual performance test.

(1/5)

— Tron ❂ #MicrosoftEvent (@FrontTron) June 19, 2021

While these early results look promising, a drop in performance by 30% after just two test runs isn't great, especially as GPU-demanding loads like games require sustained performance rather than transient loads like many benchmarks. This, unfortunately, seems to be a product of the SoC's manufacturing process more than the chip's own design, as previous testing by Anandtech has pointed to Samsung's 5 nm node still only playing catch-up to TSMC's 7 nm products in efficiency terms.

Then again, the Exynos-Radeon collaboration has also been hinted to be coming to laptop platforms in place of Qualcomm's 8cx Gen 3, which should offer much more headroom in thermals and power management. That would see the chip pit against the 8cx's Adreno graphics, details of which Qualcomm have remained rather tight-lipped about to date.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/90125-samsung-exynos-amd-radeon-reveal-pushed-back-july.html

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Dedicated gaming phones with better cooling solutions might be able to take advantage of these type of chips better.

 

[Lionvibez]

Good to see more competition is coming in this space.

 

[redhat]

I always wonder why most smartphone, modem devices, etc dont use small fans; here I am not talking about spinning at maximum speed but rather a speed that cant be heard by human ears

 

[Danny101]

A successful foray in this would put AMD closer to the ARM mobile market. Having more players in this market can only be better for everyone.

Now with Intel and AMD looking at the big. LITTLE CPU architecture for x86, that would be a nice edition to the mobile market and even an eventual Microsoft Windows Mobile reborn. Linux mobile as well. x86 does carry some legacy limitations that I hope both companies can completely dispense with in the mobile market. big. LITTLE may not make sense for the desktop market as of yet IMO.

 

[Bao Nguyen]

I always wonder why most smartphone, modem devices, etc dont use small fans; here I am not talking about spinning at maximum speed but rather a speed that cant be heard by human ears

Which would requires airflow and exhaust holes which reduce the ability of waterproofing. I'd rather have my phones to be waterproof than just having one drop to the pool and have to buy new one.

 

[Xex360]

I would rather have a phone with several days of battery like we used to have.

 

[hahahanoobs]

There are already 4-6 amazing gaming phones currently available, so I'm not seeing Exynos with AMD graphics fitting in anywhere really. I hope they don't think they'll sell phones on their names alone.

I don't see this partnership going anywhere. Bet.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I always wonder why most smartphone, modem devices, etc dont use small fans; here I am not talking about spinning at maximum speed but rather a speed that cant be heard by human ears

Diminishing returns? Even a 10-15mm fan would take a massive amount of space in a phone and provide very little cooling. And you would need a heatsink with surface area which again takes tons of space in a device where space is at a premium. Not to mention the insane noise such a small fan would make:

There's really no need for so much processing power in a phone. Processors requiring active cooling are far too power hungry for the form factor.

 

[Eldritch]

These are interesting times. On one hand we have cloud computers bringing PC games to handhelds and TVs etc.

On the other, we are fast approaching a situation where mobiles will be enough to play 4-5 years old games. With gamepads ofcourse. This may eat up the market of casual consoles like Switch in medium term.

Cloud gaming has it real hard due to latency limitations. These limitations are not going anywhere.
Mobile gaming, as much as I hate in its current form (IAP/Gems/Ridiculous ads/Cumulative IAP cost higher than AAA/Time restrictions/Infinite padding etc) but it really has potential if quality developers with clear cut sales prices start development in future and if they stop pretending that touch controls are enough for most games. Gamepads are dirt cheap, any potential customer will easily buy it.

Let's see.

Edit : Hey mobile makers and Google, its time you offload casting to a dedicated chip so it doesn't totally mess up performance and latency.
Also, enable casting of every full screen app. Screen mirroring is atrocious and almost no game supports casting to tv/laptop/tablet etc.

 

[AMN3S1AC]

These are interesting times. On one hand we have cloud computers bringing PC games to handhelds and TVs etc.

On the other, we are fast approaching a situation where mobiles will be enough to play 4-5 years old games. With gamepads ofcourse. This may eat up the market of casual consoles like Switch in medium term.

Cloud gaming has it real hard due to latency limitations. These limitations are not going anywhere.
Mobile gaming, as much as I hate in its current form (IAP/Gems/Ridiculous ads/Cumulative IAP cost higher than AAA/Time restrictions/Infinite padding etc) but it really has potential if quality developers with clear cut sales prices start development in future and if they stop pretending that touch controls are enough for most games. Gamepads are dirt cheap, any potential customer will easily buy it.

Let's see.

Agreed, and I would add that if the Switch wasn't made by Nintendo, it would have been a total failure, as its main appeal are the great first-party titles. So, the casual/handheld console market is already pretty much gone outside of those looking to play Nintendo's games.

 

[Irata]

I would rather have a phone with several days of battery like we used to have.

Still fondly remember my Philips Xenium feature phone that would last 30 days and that was using it.

 

[Eldritch]

Still fondly remember my Philips Xenium feature phone that would last 30 days and that was using it.

Don't most phones come with ultra power saving mode which makes it a feature phone and results in weeks worth of battery life?

Can't have it all, bud.

 

[Irata]

Don't most phones come with ultra power saving mode which makes it a feature phone and results in weeks worth of battery life?

Can't have it all, bud.

I know I can‘t have it all, but that doesn‘t mean I can‘t miss only having to charge my phone once a month. Or miss user replaceable batteries for that matter.

Of course, that was many years ago, but the Xenium phones were nice and also had a much longer battery life time than other feature phones while not skimping on features.

Speaking of power saving features - I am not aware of any smart phones that last for weeks even if you shut most things off. And in that case, getting a smart phone would not make much sense in the first place as feature phones are still available, just sadly only the very basic variety.

 

[defaultluser]

I know I can‘t have it all, but that doesn‘t mean I can‘t miss only having to charge my phone once a month. Or miss user replaceable batteries for that matter.

Of course, that was many years ago, but the Xenium phones were nice and also had a much longer battery life time than other feature phones while not skimping on features.

Speaking of power saving features - I am not aware of any smart phones that last for weeks even if you shut most things off. And in that case, getting a smart phone would not make much sense in the first place as feature phones are still available, just sadly only the very basic variety.

My Google Pixel 2 uses around 10 percent batter per day if here on WiFi, ad double that in the average 4g coverage

New, you could get five days LTE , mostly idle (but still running power hogs like Facebook)

You folks are just addicted to massive-screened devices from companies with questionable powerplans

 

[duckofdeath]

Still fondly remember my Philips Xenium feature phone that would last 30 days and that was using it.

They still sell feature phones. These days they get six months standby. Stop reading tech news if you hate tech news....

 

[duckofdeath]

The side effect of years of TSMC gaslighting:

"... seems to be a product of the SoC's manufacturing process more than the chip's own design...".

Is desktop graphics considers the pinnacle of power efficiency these days? How thick can a card get before we say, "enough is enough"? If we're being honest, is AMD dominating Nvidia on mobile PC graphics these days (or ever)? Is AMD able to produce any real volumes of their current graphics cards at that alleged superior TSMC fab?

 

[yeeeeman]

Pathetic, as expected from AMD.
As an experiment, yeah, this is nice. But AMD can't overdo ARM/Qualcomm at their own game, that is mobile gpus on their first try.

 

[Irata]

They still sell feature phones. These days they get six months standby. Stop reading tech news if you hate tech news....

Obviously I like tech else I wouldn‘t be here. But that does not mean I need to like every aspect of every new tech. There‘s usually a pro and con to everything.

Do I miss forgetting where I put my charger since the phone needed to be charged so rarely in spite of not worrying about energy use ?
Absolutely.

Does this make me want to use a feature phone instead of a good smartphone ?
Absolutely not, as its advantages for me outweigh the drawbacks.

 

[Shadowboxer]

I love my switch lite so much. It has dreadful hardware but the software is engineered so well it’s playable. Playing Skyrim on a packed out plane on a little device that weighs nothing is amazing. It doesn’t matter if it’s only 720p or lower at 30fps if it’s in your hand. I just wish my girlfriend would stop borrowing it to play animal crossing ffs.

The problem with mobile phones is this software support. They already have hardware capable of providing great gaming experiences but there’s no company trying to deliver a decent games that are configured well to run on mobiles. There’s no decent software solution. So whilst AMD making a GPU for a phone is interesting, it’s not very exciting as there is little to no software for it.

 

[Shadowboxer]

My Google Pixel 2 uses around 10 percent batter per day if here on WiFi, ad double that in the average 4g coverage

New, you could get five days LTE , mostly idle (but still running power hogs like Facebook)

You folks are just addicted to massive-screened devices from companies with questionable powerplans

We do seem to have an unusual like for big screened phones, if you showed me 15 years ago my iPhone 11 Pro Max I’d be impressed of course but also shocked at how big it is.

I recently had a little fondle of an iPhone 12 mini. It was deliciously small, it felt like a key-ring and I hope that Apple continue that line so that when this 11 pro max behemoth dies I can get a smaller phone.

However smaller screened phones have smaller batteries and actually don’t last as long as the big ping pong racket sized phones we all have today.

P.S. I don’t believe your battery life claims on your pixel 2.

 

[punctualturn]