Samsung Electronics has appointed John Rayfield, former Senior Vice President at AMD and Intel, to lead the development of their GPU, system IP, and SoC architecture at Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC) and Advanced Computing Lab (ACL).
Rayfield's appointment is seen as a step towards improving the capabilities of Exynos GPUs and also the Exynos chips themselves, which still have a bad reputation compared to Qualcomm and MediaTek chips at this time.
In a statement issued via his personal LinkedIn page, Rayfield praised the efforts made by the SARC/ACL team in producing the latest Exynos 2600 chip equipped with the Xclipse 960 GPU. It is the world's first chip produced using 2nm technology and will be used in some devices in the Galaxy S26 series that will be launched next year.
Rayfield is a veteran in the semiconductor world, having been involved in the development of the Ryzen AI 300 series chips at AMD and the development of the Visual Intelligence Processing Unit (VPU) chip of the Meteor Lake chip at Intel. For those who are not fans of Exynos chips, the presence of Rayfield may finally allow this Samsung-made chip to compete more competitively with other chips on the market.