Samsung already feels at home in the mobile market, dominating Android sales with its Galaxy line of smartphones, while lining releases with its Exynos processors anywhere outside of the US. Expanding on its in-house production, the South Korean company is now reportedly looking at producing its own mobile graphics.
Qualcomm tends to dominate both the mobile processor and GPU market, thanks to its Snapdragon and Adreno chips respectively. Samsung is forced to implement both of these within the United States and China thanks to CDMA patents, however the company takes care of its processors in-house and licenses ARM-designed Mali GPUs internationally.
Rumours appeared that Samsung was in talks with both Nvidia and AMD to source new third-party mobile GPUs, but according to recent job listings that have appeared on LinkedIn, via Samsung’s recruiting partner Veronica Smith, it seems that the company has taken a different direction entirely with plans to brings its own technology to the forefront.
The job description asks for “skillful individuals who want to build, create and contribute to the next generation of low power units for Compute and Mobile markets,” suggesting that Samsung is initially aiming to implement the new technology in its low-to-mid-range handsets before attempting to change its flagship Galaxy S Series.
This move follows in Apple’s footsteps, taking full control over the production of its two primary smartphone chips to develop every aspect in-house. Primarily, this is expected to be a cost cutting measure, bumping its budget handsets even lower in price while Samsung perfects the technology. Once it has everything in place, the company is expected to gear up towards machine learning and deep learning algorithms, but this is a long way off just yet.
Samsung has been reportedly working on its own GPU technology for quite some time, with reports surfacing three years ago stating that 2018 could be an estimated debut. Given that the job listings are so recent, it’s unlikely that we will see this technology for quite some time yet, but this is official confirmation that the firm plans to move forward in the graphics market.
KitGuru Says: Breaking into a market already dominated by other parties is always difficult, but if anyone can do it, Samsung can. Hopefully this gears Samsung up to be more competitively priced moving forward.