Samsung’s next Exynos SoC will have an AMD GPU
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This could be an interesting chip to use in a stand-alone VR headset like the Quest.
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It's really interesting to see how many GPUs have its roots with ATI, such as AMD's GPU lineups in desktops/consoles to Qualcomm's Adreno's GPUs. Does the Mali GPU currently.found in Exynos chips have similar roots, or is it its own thing?
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I always figured that the Exynos thing was used both as a fail safe to a single supply issue (e.g. what if Apple bought all of Qualcom's fab power for two years)? and as negotiation leverage with Qualcom (we can walk away from your terms if we have to). Both are legit reasons, but Exynos has rarely beat contemporary Qualcom SOCs in any category - let alone swept the board.
But I didn't realize that Samsung didn't use Exynos for its domestic phones in the last round of manufacturing. Given the Asian concept of "face" that's a bigger insult to the Exynos division (specifically it's leader) than most of us Westerners can comprehend.
Given AMD's experience in GPUs as well as APUs there's a chance they can do more for Samsung than just fancy 3d graphics. If work is shared smartly between Exynos and the AMD GPU, then perhaps we'll see performance enhancements across the board. I'm not sure I want to know what it'll do to battery life though.
But I didn't realize that Samsung didn't use Exynos for its domestic phones in the last round of manufacturing. Given the Asian concept of "face" that's a bigger insult to the Exynos division (specifically it's leader) than most of us Westerners can comprehend.
Given AMD's experience in GPUs as well as APUs there's a chance they can do more for Samsung than just fancy 3d graphics. If work is shared smartly between Exynos and the AMD GPU, then perhaps we'll see performance enhancements across the board. I'm not sure I want to know what it'll do to battery life though.
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I'll mention it here, too, for Ron et al:
Why no coverage yet of Qualcomm's purchase of Nuvia? Nuvia is founded by and run by former Apple architects that contributed to several generations of Apple's custom silicon performance gains, and they claim they can beat even Apple's designs on both performance and power characteristics. Qualcomm buying them is a big story.
Why no coverage yet of Qualcomm's purchase of Nuvia? Nuvia is founded by and run by former Apple architects that contributed to several generations of Apple's custom silicon performance gains, and they claim they can beat even Apple's designs on both performance and power characteristics. Qualcomm buying them is a big story.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Unless Android and their core apps are designed in tandem with a qualcomm chip, it's not going to change much.
It's all mostly irrelevant anyhow. Aside from a benchmark score, you will not notice the difference in everyday usage.
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Notching up all those sweet, sweet, design wins with Tegra. And by design wins I mean "pretty much the Nintendo switch and some Nvidia-produced dev boards".
I'm not sure, but would be interested to know, if they are just more interested in reaping delicious CUDA margins than in knife fighting over SoC sales; if their weakness in cell modems(if memory serves they had a development effort that didn't go too much of anywhere and eventually got sold or back-burnered) is abject enough that they don't think it's worth it to try anymore; or if there is some other issue.
It's particularly interesting, to me, that (despite providing the chip for the original round of 'Windows RT' windows-on-arm devices) they are nowhere to be seen in Microsoft's windows-on-arm efforts, despite the fact that Nvidia windows GPU drivers are presumably in a much better state than Qualcomm windows GPU drivers; and there are also no Tegra chromebooks.
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Edit: Post deleted by author. Inacurate and/or redundant info given. Sorry.
There is a Quote with the original post.
Again, Sorry.
There is a Quote with the original post.
Again, Sorry.
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I assume that the downvotes were because these facts were already written in the article.
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How about a dedicated co-processor for ad-blocking? That's a feature I'd pay for.
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Correct, and I now also realize that I gave some wrong info. "Sort of deleted" my comment in shame.
Thanks.
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I can see the review already " not premium enough, it sucks, avoid".
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It's a bit worse than losing face...
Generally Samsung uses Exynos for South Korea.
The use of Snapdragon 865 instead of Exynos 990 for South Korea is an exception.
Generally the driver of Samsung's use of Qualcomm's Snapdragon vs Exynos is the support of CDMA2000.
Qualcomm's licensing terms for CDMA2000 make it poor business for everyone else to develop SoC/modems for CDMA2000 and thus everyone tends to use Qualcomm for markets where CDMA2000 is important.
South Korea does not use CDMA2000 but China does so support for CDMA2000 may be important for some South Koreans who travel to China.
But there's another issue compounding.
The last few generations of Exynos flagship SoCs have used Mongoose CPU cores independently developed by Samsung.
Those CPU cores seem to be subpar offering worse performance/power than the mildly-modified ARM designs found in Qualcomm's chips and everyone-else-not-Apple.
That effort has been canceled with the Exynos 2100 mentioned in the article going back to all ARM designed cores.
Educated guess is that the worse power/performance and importance of China travel made Samsung sell the Qualcomm S20 in South Korea.
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Hopefully, far away. We dont need more of their tech that is strictly released to keep you locked in.
And given how they have burned every single company that made the mistake of working with them, I doubt others will try.
No worries, Nintendo will get its "reward" by working with Nvidia, its bound to happen.
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I mean, they did buy ARM. Technically nVidia's the other half of these chips. They don't really have to lean on Tegras anymore.
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Funny enough, Qualcomm did the same thing, going from in house design to stock ARM cores.
So when these two SOC's finally meet, it will be stock ARM and AMD GPU vs stock ARM and AMD-related GPU.
I wonder when the rest of the world will move on from whatever tech Qualcomm is using to maintain their monopoly.
Another small fact, for whatever reason, all Qualcomm powered Samsung phones have a locked bootloader, but Exynos dont.
If the next Galaxy S comes with this Exynos and unlocked bootloader and comes to the US, I will be over like white on rice.
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The purchase hasnt been approved yet and hopefully is not, since there is no logic as to why they will pay that much money just to access what they already had access to (ARM license).
Knowing them, they must have some really nefarious plan that will screw up the whole industry.
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Exynos hasn't been great for a while now, but I'm really hoping that the recent developments in the ARM space spur Samsung to go back to semi-custom or even custom core designs. They would have the resources and a reason to push that forward.
I really want high performance ARM to not be the sole or primary province of Apple and Qualcomm, two companies I strongly dislike for different reasons. And before you say it: I know Qualcomm is currently running off-the-shelf ARM cores but my prediction is that they will go back to custom/semi-custom cores soon enough. Of course, that might depend on what Nvidia does (if the sale goes through).
Because they're trying to buy ARM (I don't think that deal has been approved by various regulatory bodies), they will likely say nothing and do nothing that might compromise the sale.
But I wouldn't be surprised is ARM's Mali GPU gets infused with some Nvidia tech down the road, or even gets outright replaced.
I really want high performance ARM to not be the sole or primary province of Apple and Qualcomm, two companies I strongly dislike for different reasons. And before you say it: I know Qualcomm is currently running off-the-shelf ARM cores but my prediction is that they will go back to custom/semi-custom cores soon enough. Of course, that might depend on what Nvidia does (if the sale goes through).
Because they're trying to buy ARM (I don't think that deal has been approved by various regulatory bodies), they will likely say nothing and do nothing that might compromise the sale.
But I wouldn't be surprised is ARM's Mali GPU gets infused with some Nvidia tech down the road, or even gets outright replaced.
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Most of the world never adopted this Qualcomm thing hence we get chips from Samsung, Mediatek, HiSillicon.
And the rest will drop it sooner than later as carriers convert precious spectrum from 3G to 4G/5G.
In the US basically whenever Verizon and Sprint actually kill their 3G will be the end of Qualcomm's dominance of the US' market.
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Qualcomm has tried and given up on in-house cores twice.
I'm not sure why you think they'll go back for a 3rd attempt at in-house cores any time soon.
Also Samsung is giving up on in-house cores. The Exynos 2100 will be their all-ARM core flagship SoC in a while dropping their in-house Mongoose cores.
So I wouldn't expect any new in-house cores from them anytime soon.
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I smell a third try coming up:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/qualc ... 1610544917
Hint, Nuvia has employees that worked on the first couple of Apple ARM cores designs.
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Buying ARM to do their own SoCs, and collect royalty payments from their competitors.
Also probably a good way to prevent Qualcomm from suing them if the make their own modems for the US.
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I am more interested in how Qualcomm will fare against Apple Silicon in the PC realm though. I mean, Apple M1 is clearly nailing their entrance into the PC processor market (with some problem here and there, but overall, nails it). Something that SD 8cx and SD 8cx 2nd Gen (and it's derivative, SQ1 and SQ2) cannot.
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I had a tablet with a Tegra chip in it. Support for that Tegra chip died immediately afterward so the tablet was forever trapped on the version of Android it shipped with. That was the last Tegra chip I bought. It was amazing that a company that supports GPUs well past the point where they're still relevant for gaming was the absolute worst at keeping their Android drivers up to date.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Well, that's interesting because the Denver and X1 Tegra chips have been supported by Nnvidia longer than anything else for the time they were deployed. I mean, the nvidia shield tablet was 3 years, and the x1 shield for Android TV is still going on today.
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Samsung finds itself in the new position of being able to compete head to head as a flagship SOC vendor against Qualcomm.
As the cellular providers finally turn off CDMA completely, Qualcomm can no longer use those patents as an anticompetitive weapon, so the barriers to Samsung succeeding become technical instead of legal.
As far as core design goes, Samsung is licensing semi-custom ARM cores, just like everyone else is.
They have their own 5G modem tech.
They have AMD's GPU tech.
I'd say that they will be competitive in the Android space in the near future, especially with the heat, throttling, and power draw problems Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 is having.
As the cellular providers finally turn off CDMA completely, Qualcomm can no longer use those patents as an anticompetitive weapon, so the barriers to Samsung succeeding become technical instead of legal.
As far as core design goes, Samsung is licensing semi-custom ARM cores, just like everyone else is.
They have their own 5G modem tech.
They have AMD's GPU tech.
I'd say that they will be competitive in the Android space in the near future, especially with the heat, throttling, and power draw problems Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 is having.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
But how well is Win10 made to work on it? I mean, Win10 for phones worked very well on worse processors. Unfortunately full win10 is a horribly unoptimzed mess for decades, but the upside of that is it works well with lots of hardware over 10 years old.
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Take the PR spin with a mound of salt, Nuvia has yet to demonstrate or prove much of anything. They are very young and have some brilliant minds so definitely don't underestimate them but raw talent =/= good products (just look at Intel). Im eagerly waiting for real results and wish them luck, especially in a world where pretty much every big player not named Apple or Huawei gave up on custom cores and increasingly rely on bog standard ARM licensed cores.
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Windows 10 runs so much faster on an M1 Mac in a virtual machine than it does on Microsoft's more expensive flagship hardware, that Linus Tech Tips relentlessly made fun of Microsoft in a comparison between an M1 Macbook Air and the Surface X Pro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA
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That last part just seems like a bald faced lie. Apps, heck basic websites, are getting more complex and heavier. Even on a brand new Galaxy Note 20 I drop frames while scrolling websites like Ars Technica for example.
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