You know what would make smartphones even more distracting than they already are? Console-quality graphics. That’s just what AMD and Samsung intend to fire at users of the South Korean company’s smartphones, thanks to a new partnership that will see AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture — which you can see in action in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 — coming to Exynos processors.
Looks good for AMD
This isn’t the first we’ve heard about a partnership between the two companies. There was talk in February of an Exynos-powered Samsung notebook that used the graphics company’s rendering tech. Now, it seems, the team-up is official. Announced at Computex by AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su, RDNA 2 will turn up in Samsung’s flagship Exynos chipset soon. That is, of course, the chip that typically runs the S-series handset for the year.
What isn’t official is what Samsung’s beefed-up Exynos will do or where it’s intended to be used. It might have support for ray tracing and variable-rate shading, technologies that have been confined to games consoles and PCs up to now — but there’s no guarantee yet that the chipset will be used for smartphones. It’d be amazing if it was, but that hasn’t been confirmed. Tablets and laptops seem likely, but a smartphone running RNDA 2 will almost certainly run into battery issues.
Still, maybe Samsung and AMD have a couple of tricks up their sleeves. Samsung’s expected to announce details of the processor and what it can do a little later this year. Around the same time, we should be able to at least guess where it’ll launch first, if Samsung doesn’t make an official announcement.
Source: The Next Web
