Viewing topic Samsung to license AMD's RDNA graphics technology

Title: Samsung to license AMD's RDNA graphics technology

Maath 4 Jun 2019

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I found this interesting information from another tech news site that Samsung will be licensing AMD's RDNA technology to produce custom silicon for their upcoming phones.

[https://www.techspot.com/news/80347-samsung-bringing-amd-rdna-graphics-smartphones.html](https://www.techspot.com/news/80347-samsung-bringing-amd-rdna-graphics-smartphones.html)

Since Android phones run the Linux kernel, I wonder how this development will effect AMD's graphics drivers on Linux. I think many people running Linux with AMD graphics hardware are currently using the open source drivers because they are better. Perhaps this will spurn AMD to improve their proprietary drivers?

Or, are these drivers when written for a phone completely different? At least they won't be X86 binaries, but is there anything else fundamentally different about them? Do phones support Vulkan? Maybe only OpenGL ES?

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Maath 4 Jun 2019

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I didn't think the portion of the graphics driver which interfaces with X or Wayland was significant. I thought that mostly X would provide OpenGL or Vulkan with a portion of the screen to which it can paint, and then get out of the way. The rest is lower level code to interface to the GPU hardware.

But now I've remembered about Stadia, so probably we'll see more benefit from that direction than this one.

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