Samsung has announced the Exynos 2200, the new internal mobile processor for smartphones. It is the first mobile system-on-a-chip to feature a GPU with AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture, enabling features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
The partnership with AMD has been in the works for a long time. The two companies first announced a licensing deal in 2019, after which AMD confirmed last year that Samsung’s “next flagship mobile SoC” would use RDNA 2. Samsung recently teased an announcement event for the Exynos 2200 that was set to take place on January 11, but it was mysteriously delayed.
The Exynos 2200 is manufactured on Samsung’s 4nm EUV process. Samsung is branding this GPU as “Xclipse,” and AMD’s SVP of Radeon GPU technology David Wang says in a rack that it is “the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs.”
On the CPU side, the Exynoss uses 2200 Armv9 cores: a powerful Cortex-X2 “flagship core”, three Cortex-A710 cores for balanced performance, and four more efficient Cortex-A510 cores. There’s also an improved NPU that Samsung claims will perform twice as fast as its predecessor, and the ISP architecture is designed to support camera sensors up to 200 megapixels, one of which Samsung announced last year.
Samsung’s very best Exynos chips usually make their way into the company’s flagship Galaxy S phone series, although models sold in the US and certain other markets use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs. Other phone makers like Vivo occasionally use Exynos chips in their own devices, but we’ll probably have to wait until the suspected Galaxy S22 is in our hands to find out if AMD’s tech translates into a meaningful leap forward in mobile GPUs. performance.