Former NVIDIA employee joins Samsung to help build its GPU

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    In June we had found out that Samsung was planning to build an in-house GPU, based on LinkedIn job listings. The company was hoping to get Nvidia and AMD as its future GPU suppliers. Following the footsteps of that event, we’ve now come to know that they have found the perfect member to lead the GPU team and it happens to be an Nvidia veteran – Chien Ping Lu. He used to work on nForce for Nvidia, and has also worked with MediaTek’s GPU team. 

    MediaTek’s Mali GPUs have always been quite mediocre which is why Samsung was motivated to start a project on building its own GPU few years ago. After cancelling said project for unknown reasons, they are now focused on project SGPU (Samsung’s GPU). According to unofficial information from GSMArena the work is being carried out at Austin and San Jose. It also claims that the performance per watt will be high, with simulations showing performance much better than expected.

    It was Samsung’s Suwon facility where the research for this design had started. They were experimenting with VLIW designs to help with quick processing of enormous data. With Chien Ping Lu as the team leader we can expect great results, considering the several GPU and machine learning patents he has (you can check them out here).

    This is an exceptionally good decision as Samsung’s Exynos chips have always lacked in the graphics department. Their Snapdragon counterparts, while having slightly slower CPU performance, have had significantly better GPU performance. While not necessarily the Galaxy S10, we can expect Samsung’s future phones to pack some serious graphical performance.

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