Samsung Rumored To Be Developing In-House GPU for Mobile Devices

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Back in 2015, Samsung was reportedly expected to develop and release its own GPU for its mobile devices. However, the company continued using ARM’s Mali GPUs in its Exynos chipsets, and also kept using Qualcomm SoCs for key markets. Sammobile and Gizchina report that Samsung is finalizing the development of its first in-house GPU, allegedly named “S-GPU”. The info comes from leakster @IceUniverse who posted it on Weibo.

It’s not the first time that Samsung decides to bring its own technology to the battlefield instead of signing an agreement with other companies. The Korean OEM has been packing Exynos CPUs in their devices for almost every generation, and even featured them exclusively on the Note 5 and Galaxy S6. Samsung licensed the ARMv8 ISA from ARM to design and build the micro-architecture for the custom cores of its newer chipsets, and they’ve mostly proved to be a success by being both power-efficient and quite performant.

We have no details about the S-GPU yet, though, and even this internal name could change when the product is released as well. Last year, Samsung was in talks with Nvidia and AMD, presumably for obtaining the GPU-related licenses needed to create the in-house chip. According to reports, the S-GPU is rumored to appear on next year’s flagship devices — however, we’d take such claims with a grain of salt given we’ve heard similar tales in previous years.

If these rumors are true, though, the South Korean OEM will have to face serious competition from ARM, PowerVR, and Qualcomm. Will the S-GPU have enough power to compete with the likes of the Adreno or Mali? Only time will tell, but the bottom line is that Samsung won’t have to pay other companies to use their GPUs.

Source [1]: Sammobile Source [2]: Gizchina