Exynos SoCs rumored to feature Samsung GPUs and HSA

[Ekpyrosis]

After a leaked Geekbench score there are more news about Samsung's future Ekynos chips.

 

A Chinese site has rumored (leaked?) a roadmap which, if true, reveals some insteresting details.

So far, Samsung has used Mali GPUs for its Exynos SoCs, which are licensed by ARM Holdings just like the ARM CPU design. According to this rumor, Samsung is developing its own GPU for some date in the future, which seems plausible, given that Samsung can already make so many different parts of their phones themselves.

Additonally, the roadmap says that Samsung will implement Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) in future SoCs. This means that CPU and GPU will use the same bus, which reduces latency between different components and is useful for GPGPU computing. This technology was prominently featured in the PS3, with mixed reception, but that might also be a result of poor documentation, I believe that Samsung could carry it out in a meaningful way. It's still a really forward-thinking technology with big potential. It's all still a rumor, so take it cum grano salis.

 

The rumored roadmap suggests that a Samsung Exynos SoC with HSA is going to arrive in a year or two with a Mali GPU and then by 2018 the GPU will be replaced by one Samsung has developed on its own in a newer Exynos chipset. So far Samsung has not confirmed anything regarding its plans to develop its own graphics processor so it would be best to take this with a pinch of salt for now.

 

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[patrickjp93]

I still can't believe people think HSA is something truly groundbreaking and new. OpenMP (which Intel designed long before HSA was even a thought) has had GPU offloading potential for years along with shared memory translation and even 0-copy functionality. HSA is the same thing with a slightly different hardware design philosophy and a worse programming model. And now there's the HSAIL virtual language which is now at odds with SPIR-V. Can this become any more of a snarled mess?