Samsung develops new mobile graphics architecture praised by analysts

Samsung is one of the absolute giants in the market when it comes to manufacturing components for mobile devices, which also includes the integrated circuit sets (SoCs) that form the heart of the mobile devices.

Unlike competitors such as Apple and Qualcomm, Samsung has long licensed technology for both processor and graphics part from ARM Holdings. The first step towards becoming more independent was when the company developed its own ARM-based processor cores for the Exynos 8 Octa 8890 circuit set, and now the company is said to have come a long way in the development of its own graphics architecture.

The work with the new architecture is led by Dr. Chien-Ping Lu, an industry veteran who led the development of the integrated graphics technology in Nvidia’s Nforce motherboards used with processors from Intel and AMD. After Nvidia, he moved on to lead the development of mobile graphics circuits at Mediatek that never reached the market.

Last year, he was recruited by Samsung to work on a self-developed graphics circuit. According to analyst Jon Peddie, the proprietary design should be so good that it can not only compete on a par with what Apple has done in the latest system circuits but also be so scalable that it can be used in supercomputers and other demanding applications.

The project name for the new circuit will be SGPU, logically an abbreviation of Samsung GPU, and during the test phase, the new design is said to perform better than the original expectations. Specifically, the circuit’s ability to execute instructions in groups (batch processing) should lead to a significant reduction in latency, and thus significant progress for VR experiences.

The analyst speculates that the architecture has the potential to achieve success in everything from phones to game consoles, TVs and computers if Samsung manages the potential well. Speculation also indicates that the first commercial products with the new graphics architecture will reach the market by this time next year.