What is the current situation of Samsung's own GPU?
Some analysts believe that Samsung may have been mulling a GPU development project many years ago, and may have developed to a certain extent, only a serious and solemn appearance of the moment. However, according to a recent report from EE Times, Samsung's development of its own GPU is still in the planning stage, which is the stage of drawing blueprints, and there has not been any substantial progress.
At the time, the report said that Samsung's self-developed GPUs will adopt a new architecture, and will be a new architecture that has been disrupted in the industry for 10 years. The leader responsible for the new architecture design is former Nvidia engineer Chien-Ping Lu, who developed After nForce IGP, I also stayed at MediaTek. The key is that the new architecture will allow Samsung GPUs to compete with Apple, and because the architecture provides out-of-color energy efficiency, the performance per watt is the highest, and it is very destructive to Qualcomm. .
Not only that, Samsung's GPU architecture is suitable for a wide range of applications, mobile phones, automobiles, and supercomputers. Obviously, these seemingly exaggerated propagandas are generally based on preliminary analysis of finished products that have not been personally verified, so these may be just Samsung targets. And the report also said that at this time of the middle of next year, Samsung will be able to release its own GPU, which is even more doubtful.
In any case, Samsung definitely has its own goals and timetables. Before we see the finished products, now we are more concerned about the question of why Samsung independently designs and develops GPUs.
Settling a bargaining chip with ARM to trade off between spending more and less
The idea of Samsung's own design of GPU may have sprouted as early as 2015. At the end of March, it was reported that Samsung was considering acquiring traditional chip design manufacturer AMD, and had a strong interest in GPU IP (intellectual property) to increase opportunities. The GPU puts itself in a more favorable position. After all, since AMD's troubles, the big players including Apple, Qualcomm, etc. have begun to dig talent from AMD.
However, by June 2015, Samsung’s rumor of acquiring AMD’s GPU was not broken, because Samsung and ARM signed a long-term technical cooperation agreement on GPU, clarifying that all Samsung’s own Exynos chips will adopt Mali from ARM for a long time. GPU products, from Midgard to the latest Bifrost architecture and Mali-G series GPUs.
Of course, the so-called 'long-term' agreement, the outside world does not know how many years, maybe the five-year period is a reasonable period. If this period is not false, it means that the agreement may expire in mid-2020. Based on this If Samsung chooses to renew, Samsung may only be pretending to be in a new round of licensing negotiations with ARM. But it is not excluded that Samsung does not sign. After all, there is a backup plan that is very important. I don't know if I want the agreement I want.
In addition to striving to negotiate a licensing agreement with ARM, cost savings should be another major factor. Samsung's semiconductor business has become an important part of the group's profitability. As a result, smartphone shipments have slowed and profit margins have been slowing. Continued decline, if Samsung can independently produce all components including display screen, memory, flash memory and performance chips, Samsung's smartphone business is still expected to maintain a very high profit margin.
However, since any large company will have a strict review of the company's internal expenses, Samsung's expenditure on the semiconductor business is no exception. Therefore, Samsung will inevitably weigh the independent research and development, licensing and patent fees, because many The R&D and design of mobile phone internal components is not cheap, especially from the beginning. If Samsung believes that self-developed GPUs are more efficient in the long run, then Samsung will inevitably stick to this path after the ARM agreement expires.
Perhaps performance is king
As mentioned above, as the profit margin of the smartphone market continues to decline, it is increasingly critical to be able to develop key components independently. For Samsung, Exynos chips must play an increasingly important role in the company's profitability. Not only that, but Samsung's self-developed chips will also gain a higher reputation. At least Samsung can be proved to be a very good semiconductor designer with the ability to compete directly with companies such as Qualcomm and Apple.
Therefore, it is very important to come up with a high-end product that can compete with competitors. After all, the demand for performance of mobile devices is getting higher and higher, not only mobile games, but also the mobile VR virtual reality that is generally optimistic in the industry. And AR augmented reality. But currently Samsung's flagship GPU performance is not strong enough, at least from the GFXBench record of running points data, ARM's Mali GPU performance is flat.
Apple's A11 in the case of self-developed GPU, 2K resolution Manhattan scene can run 38.5fps, 1080p is 67.4fps. Samsung Exynos version Galaxy S9 Mali-G72 in the same scene, 2K only 26.3fps, 1080p It's only 46.8fps. In fact, this is not much different from the previous generation Galaxy S8, because the S8 integrated Mali-G71 GPU also ran 25.7fps in 2K, 1080p even higher 48.7fps.
Obviously, the ARM GPU used by Samsung is still difficult to compete with the GPU of the Apple A-based chip, not as good as the Qualcomm Adreno GPU. It should be noted that the Snapdragon 845 integrated Adreno 630 GPU is significantly improved, and in many respects Apple is more powerful for GPUs designed for the iPhone. In addition, because Samsung's flagship usually has two versions of Qualcomm and Exynos, different GPUs also cause flagship performance inconsistency.
When ARM announced the new-generation Mali-G76 GPU, it promised to bring about 30% energy efficiency improvement, but in the case of energy efficiency improvement, performance will only bring about 1.5 times improvement. But even then, wait until Samsung The next generation flagship uses the Mali-G76, which can only narrow the gap with the iPhone X's GPU performance. It's really impossible to talk about it. But if Samsung takes out its own GPU and can take it to the next level in the high-end market, I believe everyone will look at it.
Samsung has not tasted the benefits of self-designed chips. At present, Samsung's most important Exynos chips have self-customized Mongoose CPU cores. The performance of the CPU core is significantly improved, ahead of the chips using ARM public version architecture, although the actual There is not much lead, but the running score is much higher. However, Samsung still can only rely on ARM's product line for GPU, so in the case of ARM behind, Samsung has no other choice. So, if you want GPU performance to achieve The level of self-designed GPU is inevitably the best choice.
Not only does the phone need a GPU
The smartphone market will be the most reasonable entry point for Samsung's own GPU, but this does not mean that the mobile phone is the only market that Samsung considers. The opening news also mentioned that Samsung's GPU is suitable for multiple platforms. Considering that Samsung is a large group. There are countless consumer electronics products, including smart refrigerators, smart washing machines and top-level OLED TVs. These products, as long as there is a demand for graphics processing, there must be a place where the independent GPU can play.
Many rumors believe that Samsung's own GPU may start from the low-end products. If this is true, Samsung should first target the Internet of Things and smart home, and combine the GPU with the products of these markets. Samsung also has a smart watch product line. The self-developed GPU will definitely play an important role in this product line.
In addition, in emerging areas such as object detection and machine learning, GPU processing performance has become more and more important, because GPU can process data in parallel faster than CPU, which can be a longer-term for Samsung. Goals. In the automotive and home security arena, there are more and more market segments, and self-customized GPUs can also benefit Samsung.
Going back to the direction of the smartphone, we all know that Samsung's flagship smartphones have not integrated dedicated machine learning processing units so far, but rely on GPUs and visual processing units to handle this task. So, custom-built GPUs In addition to improving graphics performance, it also helps Samsung to play a key role in machine learning in mobile phones, including speeding up specific applications and commands.
I usually look at Samsung’s own design of GPU.
In short, Samsung can design its own GPU for many reasons, and most of the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, helping Samsung to guarantee profit margins, reduce the cost of licensing fees, greatly reduce costs, and even help Samsung to open up new markets, etc. When more and more independent GPUs appear in the market to compete with each other, it is also conducive to faster growth of the entire industry.
However, the design of autonomous GPUs is not something that can be done overnight. It usually takes years of technical accumulation and a lot of R&D investment, especially to build high-end independent GPUs. Independent GPUs can be made without saying that, including Apple. So, Samsung There is no conclusion about the custom-made GPU. Maybe Samsung has already started it. The flowering result is still too early, but it is possible that Samsung is still planning a blueprint, and even does not rule out that it is a loss-making investment.
Having said that, how Samsung is trying to avoid patent infringements like Apple is also a problem. In retrospect, Samsung’s long-term technology agreement with ARM was in the background. Samsung and Nvidia are in the process of filing a lawsuit involving many graphics. Patent in the technical field, this lawsuit did not reach a settlement until 2016. If the agreement expires, Samsung will not continue to sign with ARM, but launch autonomous GPU, will ARM in turn fight patents with Samsung?
In any case, the mall, such as the battlefield, the survival of the enterprise is almost the first priority. Before Samsung officially confirmed the self-developed GPU, we only need to look at it with normality.