Samsung Reportedly Designing Its Own GPU

Reports are coming out that Samsung for the past few years has been working on its own original graphics processor design.

While it should hardly come as a surprise given that Samsung continues to be one of the dominant ARM SoC producers, they're reportedly in the process of designing their own original GPU to reduce the need for out-sourcing the critical part of consumer systems. While on a slightly different note, Samsung has also been in a legal scuffle recently with NVIDIA recently over GPU patents with regard to a set of NVIDIA patents being taken advantage of by Adreno, Mali, and PowerVR GPU designs.

In working on the company's first GPU, Samsung has reportedly poached GPU designers from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and other firms. It's not clear, however, when any SoCs bearing an original Samsung GPU will come to market but hopefully we're not too far out given that the project has been in the works for a while, according to Fudzilla.

For the current Exynos line-up Samsung relies on the ARM Mali GPU while in some of their designs they have also resorted to Imagination Technologies with their PowerVR SGX graphics hardware. Given Samsung's Android focus, they will surely have good driver support there for any new GPU while hopefully they will also extend to make sure things work good for X.Org and Wayland Linux desktop environments too -- there stands a chance for a good DRM driver with targeting Wayland if the Samsung GPU will also find itself within Tizen applications.