Going by job listings on LinkedIn, Samsung has decided to build an in-house GPU. The company reportedly sniffed around AMD and Nvidia as potential GPU suppliers, but nothing came of it. Now it may follow in the footsteps of Apple and have design the second major component of a chipset in-house.
A California-based design team is pulling talent from Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia to design alternative graphics cores to ARM’s Mali, which Samsung is using in its Exynos chips.
Samsung will aims to build flagship GPUs but will start from the more affordable segment so that it can gain experience. The second-gen GPUs should go into high-end phones along with other applications – self-driving cars and machine learning.
Samsung’s Mongoose cores outperform their contemporary Cortex-A cores and if it can replicate that success in the graphics field, it will be able to reduce its dependence on ARM. Also, the company does have an advantage over Apple – in-house modems while Cupertino has had to rely on Qualcomm and Intel.
