Hiring Spree
While Samsung Electronics is actively seeking to develop cutting-edge graphics processing units (GPUs), competition is heating up to increase human resources among countries around the world, especially the United States. Regarding this, Samsung Electronics is making a move to develop technology for GPUs, which are the core of its flagship application processor (AP) Exynos’ competitiveness, experts say.
According to industry sources on April 2, Samsung Electronics is moving to expand its GPU development personnel centering on its U.S.-based research centers in Texas and San Jose. Since the beginning of the year, Samsung’s U.S. subsidiary has been constantly posting job opportunity announcements to hire developers, including GPU architecture engineers.
In April of last year, Samsung Electronics dispatched vice president Kim Taek-hyun to the Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC) Advanced Computing Lab in the United States and appointed him as the head of the GPU Development Team. Vice President Kim orchestrated the development of software such as GPUs for mobile APs jointly developed by Samsung and AMD at the System LSI Division of Samsung Electronics. Industry insiders cite Kim’s strong and wide global network as the main reason for deploying Kim to the United States.
Currently, Samsung is working with U.S.-based AMD to develop GPUs for its Exynos AP. After suddenly announcing cooperation in 2021, the Korean tech giant optimized AMD GPU design intellectual property (IP) specialized for PCs to use it as mobile chips and loaded it into the Exynos 2200 last year. However, the company failed to enjoy any significant performance improvement.
Industry observers are predicting that Samsung Electronics will devise its GPU strategy. In particular, rumors of Samsung Electronics’ own GPU development, which had been going on for several years, have begun going around again. Foreign media outlets and industry insiders believe that Samsung is developing its own custom GPUs based on AMD’s RDNA structure. This also explains why Samsung Electronics actively recruited talented GPU development engineers.
On top of that, ARM, which has a large number of core semiconductor design IPs, is considering preventing other companies from using its own and other companies’ IP together in a lawsuit. Also, the possibility of even pushing for an increase in design IP royalties (patent use fees) has been raised, so the semiconductor design and manufacturing industries are faced with increasing variables too.
Some analysts say that Samsung Electronics is expanding its reach beyond mobile chips to other markets that utilize GPUs. Already, it has diverse Exynos lineups from those for mobile devices to electronic devices and modems. In addition, the company is expected to expand the use of its GPUs to high-tech fields by specifying that it will cover future industrial areas such as machine learning and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) in SARC’s announcement to hire GPU engineers.