ARM beats Imagination to provide graphics for Samsung's flagship Exynos 5 Octa

Samsung uses ARM Mali graphics processing in latest Exynos 5 in preference to Imagination's PowerVR

ARM has beaten its UK-based rival Imagination Technologies to supply graphics technology for smartphone and tablet semiconductors after winning over hardware giant Samsung.

The South Korean company is incorporating ARM's Mali graphics co-processing designs into microchips also based on ARM intellectual property as part of the latest iteration of its flagship Exynos Octa, an eight-core chip intended for the smartphone market based on the ARM Cortex A15 intellectual property using ARM's "big.Little" configuration.

The Eynos 5 Octa is the silicon inside the popular Samsung Galaxy S4, but the next version will also be sported by the upcoming Galaxy Note "phablet".

"Samsung is a high volume chip vendor and is therefore an important customer," Liberium Capital analyst Eoin Lambe told the Daily Telegraph.

According to specialist technology site Anandtech, the Imagination PowerVR SGX 544MP3 used in the Exynos 5410 proved suboptimal due to a bus interface problem. "The bus was functional but coherency was broken and manually disabled on the Galaxy S4," wrote Anandtech.

This bug had implications for power consumption and performance. "Neither ARM nor Samsung LSI will talk about the bug publicly, and Samsung didn't fess up to the problem at first either," claimed Anandtech.

The news is a blow to Imagination Technologies, which earlier this month took control of MIPS Technologies, a faded rival to ARM. Imagination's core semiconductor business is in graphics microchip designs for semiconductors and Samsung is one of the biggest suppliers of ARM-based microprocessors.

Given ARM's move into graphics co-processing designs and Imagination's purchase of MIPS, the two companies are already resolved to become increasingly competitive rivals.

In the company's earlier days - in 2001 - ARM turned to Imagination to provide PowerVR graphics cores to its licensees, and Imagination has prospered alongside ARM as the Cambridge-based chip designer has boomed.

However, with smartphones and tablets increasingly being used for games and other graphics-intensive tasks, graphics processing capabilities built into mobile semiconductors are becoming more important.