Samsung and AMD have been working together to offer Ray tracing in mobile games with in-house RDNA-based GPUs since the Galaxy S22 series, which was launched in 2022. This year’s Exynos 2400-powered Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus equip the Xclips 940 GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture. The RDNA-based GPU architecture has also made its way to the mid-range segment with the Exynos 1480 chip.
Over the last couple of years, Samsung has managed to improve the performance of its in-house Exynos flagships by quite a bit, so much so that the different chip versions of the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus perform very similar to each other in most of the use cases including gaming. The collaboratively developed RDNA GPU definitely deserves credit for this achievement.
Samsung may offer an in-house designed GPU with the Exynos 2600
However, in the latest news, tipster Roland Quandt says that Samsung might ditch the collaboration with AMD and start developing GPU architecture completely in-house starting from Exynos 2600. This chip will power the Galaxy S26 series. Notably, the Exynos 2500 chip which carries model number S5E9955 will equip an RDNA-based GPU just like its predecessors.
However, according to a report, Samsung might continue to use the RDNA architecture as the base and come up with a slightly tweaked version of it. This could resemble Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs, which have their roots in AMD’s Radeon line.
The company has reportedly created a ‘Dream Team’ of 1000 engineers to build high-end chips exclusively made for Galaxy flagships. This latest rumor of an in-house built Samsung GPU could be part of that development. The idea behind this development seems to target Apple’s success with their A-series chips. The new GPU which will be designed by Samsung should in theory offer better performance and power-efficient operation with a closer integration with the system.
Samsung could gain more control over its chips with this development
The company also has the advantage of having its own fabrication laboratory where it can build the chips all by itself. Designing a component (the GPU) in-house means greater control than any other smartphone manufacturer at this point. Rumors also suggested that the company was working on a custom CPU architecture.
Having said that, designing and fabricating chips are two of the most difficult tasks in the development of a smartphone. While no other smartphone manufacturer fabricates their processors themselves at this point, Samsung’s solution isn’t particularly the best. In fact, Samsung’s fabrication process has offered significantly lower yield rates and power efficiency of the end products. It will be interesting to see how the in-house designed GPU of the in-house fabricated Exynos 2600 chip performs in the Galaxy S26 Series.
