Samsung extends licensing agreement with AMD to use Radeon graphics on Exynos SoCs

Samsung said on Thursday that it has signed a multi-year extension with AMD on their licensing agreement which gives the South Korean tech giant access to the US chipmaker's Radeon graphics IP.

The pair signed the original agreement back in 2019 for AMD to license its custom graphics IP based on RDNA graphics architecture to Samsung for use in smartphones and other mobile devices.

Samsung has been using the AMD Radeon graphics solutions on its Exynos SoCs, which power its Galaxy smartphones, since then.

On the extension, which will cover multiple generations of AMD Radeon to more Exynos SoCs, the South Korean tech giant said it will allow it to bring “console-level graphics and optimized power consumption” to more mobile devices.

Samsung recently introduced ray tracing on its mobile processors using AMD's platform. Last year, the South Korean tech giant introduced Xclipse, its mobile graphics processing unit that uses AMD RDNA 2 architecture.

Samsung's announcement shows that it has not given up on further developing its Exynos SoCs and quelling fears about the future of its partnership with AMD, which has shown mixed results for the past couple of years.

The Exynos 2200 SoC introduced on Galaxy S22 smartphones, which Samsung touted the use of AMD RDNA 2 GPU, faced widely reported overheating problems.

The issue seems partially responsible for Samsung's use of mostly Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipsets on its recently launched Galaxy S23 smartphones.