If this year’s Galaxy S9 and Note 9 are “boring,” then the Galaxy S10 due next year is supposed to be exciting, thanks to a combination of new design features and improved hardware. We’ve already seen a large number of Galaxy S10 reports so we have a pretty good idea of what to expect. But there’s a new rumor in town that makes the Galaxy S10 even more interesting.
Samsung has supposedly perfected the kind of proprietary technology that would turn Samsung phones into formidable iPhone adversaries, and allow Samsung to stand out from the Android crowd better than ever.
A few days ago, we learned that Samsung is designing its own GPU for mobile devices, and it all seemed logical, considering that Apple is also doing the same thing. But new reports suggest Samsung may be on the verge of acknowledging a breakthrough in the GPU business, a game-changing design that could be used not only by smartphones but everything else that requires a GPU.
The new GPU delivers leading performance per watt according to an EETimes report, thanks to a novel architecture that make it compatible with a plethora of smart devices, not just smartphones.
“This is really a big deal — it’s the first new GPU design in 10 years,” Jon Peddie Research’s own Jon Peddie said.
“This design is so good they could deploy it in every platform — it’s a function of their ambition. If I owned it, it would be in everything including cockpits and supercomputers.”
The GPU is so good that it could “put in on par with Apple,” the analyst said.
Leading the charge for Samsung is Chien-Ping Lu, a graphics veteran who worked for Nvidia, and Intel before joining Samsung less than a year ago.
It’s unclear what Samsung’s new GPU has to offer, but EETimes says that Samsung’s new GPU architecture bundles multiple instructions into a group that can be executed in a single cycle. That’s how the performance per watt was increased.
The design is believed to be taped out, and it’ll be included in a future Samsung Exynos processor — next year’s Galaxy S10 is supposed to get an Exynos 9820 chip, although that doesn’t guarantee that it’ll feature a GPU made by Samsung. It’s unknown whether Samsung plans to license the technology with any other device makers.
Apple, of course, is also making its own GPU chips, although we have no idea whether they’ll be introduced this year or in 2019.
