There are rumors that Samsung has severed ties with AMD and returned to developing its own GPUs. Obviously this did not happen.

Samsung's next flagship SoC is the Exynos 2400, which will power the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ next year. Additionally, Samsung is developing the Exynos 1480, the successor to the Exynos 1380, which can be found inside the Galaxy A54.

The Exynos 1480 has been spotted on Geekbench, revealing that this SoC will feature an AMD GPU! There are rumors that Samsung may have cut ties with AMD and returned to developing GPUs in-house. However, those rumors are really unreliable as Samsung is currently bringing the power of AMD GPUs to a processor intended for mid-range phones.

The Exynos 1480 is not currently tested on a consumer device. This is to be expected since the Galaxy A55 โ€“ which is likely to be the first phone to feature the Exynos 1480 โ€“ won't be launched for the next six months or so (if Samsung sticks to the annual cycle).

However, much information about the Exynos 1480 has been leaked. This SoC has an eight-core CPU. In particular, four cores have a clock speed of 2.75 GHz; the rest are clocked at 2.05 GHz (compared to the Exynos 1380's 2.4 GHz and 2 GHz). Next to it is the Xclipse 530 GPU.

Xclipse is the brand name Samsung uses for GPUs based on AMD's graphics architecture. Xclipse 920 is the first generation, which was introduced with the high-end Exynos 2200 last year. The successor is the Xclipse 940, which will be launched with the Exynos 2400 next year. It's clear that Samsung is using the 9xx branding for high-end GPUs and 5xx for less powerful versions.

The Xclipse 530 will also use the older architecture. While the Xclipse 940 is confirmed by Samsung to be based on AMD's RDNA 3 architecture, the Xclipse 530 will be based on the same RDNA 2 architecture as the Xclipse 920.

The performance of Xclipse 530 will certainly be significantly lower. However, we cannot currently compare it with the Xclipse 920 and Xclipse 940 because the specifications of the

In other words, we don't know whether the Xclipse 530 supports ray tracing or not. Because of its high requirements, ray tracing can currently only be found on the highest-end SoC models from Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung. So it won't be surprising if the Exynos 1480 doesn't support this technology.

Even so, Samsung bringing AMD's GPU to a mid-range SoC is a welcome move. Hopefully, the company will also focus on improving the cooling capabilities of any devices they equip the Exynos 1480 to ensure this SoC's power level is not wasted due to overheating.