Samsung hires a former Nvidia employee, could be developing its own GPU

Samsung already builds a crazy range of products, everything from washing machines and refrigerators to solid state drives and NAND flash memory chips. Rumor has it the company will add in-house GPUs to the mix as well.

Jon Peddie, the prominent analyst and president of Jon Peddie Research, notes that Samsung recently hired Dr. Chien-Ping Lu, also known as CP, to manage the company's GPU development. CP is an interesting hire, having served as Nvidia's senior architecture manager from 2007 to 2011 and senior director of MediaTeck (2011-2015) and Intel (2015-2016).

According to Peddie, Samsung is actively filling out its engineering teams in hardware, software, and a few other sectors, all of which are related to GPUs. The recent addition of CP is to take the company's home-brewed GPU across the finish line.

"When you take powerhouse company like Samsung, with the biggest and best fabs, the biggest and fastest memory devices, a consumer product group that sells smartphones that cause Apple too many sleepless nights, and add a breakthrough GPU design, the first new GPU design in over a decade, the confluence of capabilities is nothing short of breath taking," Peddie says.

Whatever GPU Samsung is rumored to have designed would more than likely be a mobile part. Along those lines, another rumor points to Samsung developing a gaming phone to compete with the Razer Phone, Asus ROG Phone, and Xiaomi Black Shark. A prominent leaker has also pegged Samsung as building its Galaxy S10 around its own GPU.

The question is, would Samsung stop there? Peddie brings up the possibility of Samsung extending its GPU play into other markets, including TVs, game consoles, and yes, even PCs.

Samsung isn't saying anything, of course, but taking on the likes of AMD and Nvidia is not out of the realm of possibility. Just ask Intel, which recently assembled a graphics team dedicated to developing discrete graphics.

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).