The new deal, or a multi-year strategic partnership as AMD and Samsung are calling it, will bring AMD back to the mobile GPU market, after it sold ATI's Imagion mobile chip to Qualcomm back in January 2009, which became the Adreno GPU.

The details of the agreement are quite scarce but AMD did say it will license its custom graphics IP based on the recently announced RDNA graphics architecture which will launch as the Radeon RX 5000 series later this year. The big surprise is that the RDNA graphics architecture is scalable enough for Samsung to use it in mobile devices like smartphones, as well as other products that complement AMD product offerings. Samsung will also pay AMD technology license fees and royalties.

“As we prepare for disruptive changes in technology and discover new opportunities, our partnership with AMD will allow us to bring groundbreaking graphics products and solutions to market for tomorrow’s mobile applications," said Inyup Kang, president of Samsung Electronics’ S.LSI Business. "We look forward to working with AMD to accelerate innovations in mobile graphics technologies that will help take future mobile computing to the next level.”

“Adoption of our Radeon graphics technologies across the PC, game console, cloud and HPC markets has grown significantly and we are thrilled to now partner with industry leader Samsung to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “This strategic partnership will extend the reach of our high-performance Radeon graphics into the mobile market, significantly expanding the Radeon user base and development ecosystem.”

This is a big deal for AMD as it gives the company a steady income from a giant like Samsung. Hopefully, we will see a smartphone with AMD-based graphics from Samsung soon.