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Samsung Confirms AMD RDNA GPU in Next Exynos Flagship
- Daho0n 6y agoI wonder if this could end out with a GPU driver in the mainline kernel and a faster PinePhone.
- slezyr 6y agoYeah, the question is: "Is this the first ARM SOC with an open GPU driver?"
- FunnyLookinHat 6y agoSeems like a great starting point to get a GPU driver in the kernel and be off to the races with an ARM laptop for Linux. Maybe vendors like System76 are watching and waiting for opportunities to test the market with a product like this.
- zinekeller 6y agoOh, Microsoft will be also interested on this one (especially that Qualcomm is... well a little bit like Intel).
- wyldfire 6y agoIntel has a super good open source reputation, AFAIK.
- zinekeller 6y agoYeah, forgot about that (obviously I meant about how innovative they are in the current market or lack thereof).
- bayindirh 6y agoThey had a series of blunders in the last year but, the drivers (GPU, Ethernet) got stabilized back, it seems. I've been burned by them, so I experienced the blunders first hand.
- p_l 6y agoI'm obviously biased due to dealing with their crap drivers, but intel's reputation always felt to me to be based entirely on "they open sourced and up streamed the code, so we won't talk about how bad it is"
- bserge 6y agoThey don't even provide drivers for older devices. Really, can't spare 30MB of storage space to support a perfectly fine product? Thank God for third party websites. I have a Centrino 6235 Wifi N/Bluetooth adapter, it works just fine except it needs Intel drivers for the Bluetooth part. Their answer seems to be "just upgrade it, lol", suggesting some newer Wifi AC adapters. Higher speeds, they say. Well, first of all, I won't get anywhere near those speeds for various reasons, and second, why do I have to throw away a perfectly functioning piece of hardware? Ridiculous.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> why do I have to throw away a perfectly functioning piece of hardware? Lol. A hardware manufacturer doing things that results in consumers buy more hardware? That's like a software company discontinuing sales of an old OS in order to sell its latest abomination. Intel and MS deserve each others. Toss apple on that pile too imho. Synergy between AMD and linux/foss is a good thing, consumer-friendly behavior that should be encouraged.
- bserge 6y agoAh, good point. Though this is an adapter that Intel sells to OEMs, in this case HP... And HP does not let you install just any card, it needs to be one that's on their whitelist (embedded in the BIOS).... yeah, all of these companies are pretty bad.
- bobthebuilders 6y agoI love bios mods. Replaced a crappy N chip in my Lenovo Yoga with an AC chip.
- pjmlp 6y agoAnd a bad reputation among game developers regarding their GPUs quality.
- wyldfire 6y ago'Quality' referring to things like stability? Or performance? If the latter, I don't think it's fair to compare intel GPUs with other manufacturers'. Until very recently, intel didn't really compete with AMD/NVIDIA. And if I had to guess, their discrete GPU probably still doesn't have leading performance.
- pjmlp 6y agoEverything that is relevant for game developers.
- ksec 6y ago> GPU driver in the kernel and be off to the races with an ARM laptop for Linux. Not sure I am reading this correctly. AMD already has GPU RDNA drivers in Linux kernel. So It doesn't need Samsung to kick start this. The partnership with Samsung ARM and AMD RDNA GPU SoC only goes for Phone and Tablet, or any market that AMD silicon currently does not currently operate in.
- whizzter 6y ago> AMD already has GPU RDNA drivers in Linux kernel. So It doesn't need Samsung to kick start this. I think that was the GP's point, ie Samsung wouldn't need to invest in writing new drivers but should rather be able to do relatively easy adaptations to existing ones to get things off the ground.
- MisterTea 6y agoBack when AMD was jumping into the Arm server fray, I started fantasizing about an AMD Arm APU that was targeted at low power, embedded and mobile use. I say fantasy because at the time, aside from computer geeks, who would care about an Arm APU? Now Apple is doing just that. AMD has an interesting portfolio of processors, gpus and now fpgas. So here's another fantasy: Amd Risc-V APU. AMD hasn't had a totally unique architecture since the am29000 (29k). So it would be interesting to see them build their own CPU arch using an open instruction set with their GPU. Start with a nice quad core that can handle a laptop or mini desktop a la NUC. Another fantasy would be an AMD Zynq.
- trident5000 6y agoTheres never been a better time for Intel to build a phone and match it with open source OS software. If all the hardware is abandoning you then its time to build the hardware yourself.
- RicoElectrico 6y agoWe're talking about a company whose LTE modems were demonstrably inferior - and then sold that division to Apple. https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/237984-iphone-7s-with-intel-modems-struggle-badly-in-low-signal-areas https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/237984-iphone-7s-with-int...
- trident5000 6y agoLets be honest here, most of it would be outsourced to Chinese manufacturers anyway. Its just the chips they would build.
- hyperrail 6y agoI'd argue that Apple+Intel wasn't that far behind not-Apple+Qualcomm. And the gap was almost entirely closed from 2016 to 2018: https://www.pcmag.com/news/iphone-xs-crushes-x-in-lte-speeds-but-still-falls-short-of-qualcomm https://www.pcmag.com/news/iphone-xs-crushes-x-in-lte-speeds... > Between the three 4x4 MIMO phones, you can see that in good signal conditions, the Qualcomm-powered Galaxy Note 9 and Google Pixel 2 still do a bit better than the iPhone XS Max. But as signal gets weaker, the XS Max really competes, showing that it's well tuned. > Let's zoom in on very weak signal results. At signal levels below -120dBm (where all phones flicker between zero and one bar of reception) the XS Max is competitive with the Qualcomm phones and far superior to the iPhone X, although the Qualcomm phones can eke out a little bit more from very weak signals.
- roneythomas6 6y agoI wouldn't say the gap is closed. It's not bad as previous Intel modems but not Qualcomm quality. I had Pixel 2 went to iPhone XR(current phone). In between I also had other android phones (S9, G7 and Pixel 3) for testing purposes. When compared to iPhone XR, iPhone XR had slower speeds when compared to Qualcomm modems. Also if your carrier supports carrier aggregation then the speeds are noticeable. I had do live streams with tethering this summer and Intels modems are not fast as Qualcomm modems.
- sliken 6y agoMaybe Samsung will manage an Apple M1 competitor.
- lhoff 6y agoUp until noe, they haven't even managed to build a competitor to the Snapdragon CPUs. But let's see what they are up to.
- systemvoltage 6y agoMore than the hardware, I want a macOS competitor that doesn't require me to grow a neck beard or have a voice assistant built in.
- mhh__ 6y ago> macOS competitor that doesn't require me to grow a neck beard or have a voice assistant built in. What is genuinely so bad about Linux these days? Although I like playing with low-level stuff, I derive zero pleasure from OS-fettling and I just stuck Mint on my laptop - it's been basically perfect apart from a problem with the dual-boot setup which I think is an SSD problem waiting to explode. Half the time I read these complaints, I either see people who actually already have neck beards in denial, or people who are expecting Linux or Windows to be identical to macOS.
- systemvoltage 6y agoEverytime I install Linux, there is always something that's frustrating. Like the other day, I couldn't watch NYTimes video in fullscreen mode without Chrome crashing. Ok, so, I installed Firefox. Fullscreen video goes to my vertical monitor. No way to change this behavior. Desktop Linux is developed by people who love CLI. It's not built by people that try to address problems of common mundane people off the street. I'd rather use Windows than Linux for daily driver. Atleast UI will not freak out like in Ubuntu. Half the time I read people saying have you tried Linux Desktop, I either see people who are tasteless and love being nerdy with tmux environment, or people who are expecting others to be like themselves. As Linus Torvalds would plainly put "Desktop Linux sucks. It is the worst piece of shit attempt at Desktop OS". :-)
- f430 6y agoI asked this before but why doesn't Samsung build video game consoles? They could easily integrate this and spin it off as a console device. It has the brand name appeal, it has the capability, and the capital. Or did the door close in 1999? I'm ready for Samsung Gamestation
- dragontamer 6y agoConsoles don't actually make money (unless you're Nintendo). The games make money. The online service subscription makes money. Samsung probably can make good hardware, but I don't see them getting into the software / online platform business.
- godzillabrennus 6y agoCell phones don’t make money either. You make money with the App Store. Samsung has let Google make the money.
- adrusi 6y agoYeah, Samsung doesn't restrict itself to lucrative industries. So many of its ventures are in markets where marginal cost ≈ marginal revenue, and they're big enough and competent enough to get rich doing so. The smartphone business is maybe not the best example though, since the brand reputation that having the second biggest name in smartphones confers surely pays dividends across their consumer product lines.
- sanxiyn 6y agoCell phones totally make money, at least for Samsung. Samsung just released 2020 3Q earnings. Mobile division revenue 30B and profit 4B, >10% margin.
- tooltalk 6y agoSamsung at its peak, circa 2013, made $9.6B operating profit on $55B revenue. Samsung's gross sales revenue, profit (and margin) in mobile has been steadily declining since. The Mobile division's 2Q 2012 profit was less than 10% ($1.95B OP on $20B revenue). Then Trump's sanction of Huawei happened, after which Samsung's sales grew by 50% QoQ (3Q), but we don't expect Samsung's luck to last forever and their margin would start declining to a mid-single digit again.
- xelrre 6y agoToo bad this will never ship in a US-bound product. Samsung is so terrified of Qualcomm's patent library that their US destined products all use Qualcomm SoCs instead of Exynos.
- leeoniya 6y agoand they're super locked down, too. found out the hard way, expecting to flash lineageos onto my wife's sprint/us snapdragon-based S8 instead of the bootloader-unlocked european exynos model :( i told her to buy the sprint one cause it had better coverage in the us band spectrum.
- FunnyLookinHat 6y agoThat's not totally true... They've sold Chromebooks in US markets with Exynos (though I'm not sure how recently they refreshed that lineup). I'm not sure about the mobile market though.
- xelrre 6y agoI think these all used the older ARMv7 Exynos chips, before modems became standard in the SoC. Everything they've shipped with an ARMv8 has an onboard modem.
- 14u2c 6y agoI thought it was more to do with Qualcomm's SOCs having integrated radios for the atypical US bands, something they'd have to add on otherwise?