Samsung has announced the Exynos 2200, the in-house mobile processor for smartphones that we expect to power the upcoming S22 flagship. Samsung usually uses its Exynos processor outside the USA. It is the first mobile system-on-a-chip to include a GPU with AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture, enabling features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Ray tracing is a revolutionary technology that closely simulates how light physically behaves in the real world. By calculating the movement and the color characteristic of light rays as they bounce off the surface, ray tracing produces realistic lighting effects for graphically rendered scenes. Expect to see an improvement in gaming with the Exynos 2200.
The collaboration with AMD has been long in the making. The two companies first unveiled their partnership in a licensing deal in 2019, then 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 supposed to take place on January 11th, but it was mysteriously delayed. There were rumors that it would launch the Exynos 2200 with the Galaxy S22 on February 8th.
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 tech David Wang says in a statement that it’s “the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs.”
On the CPU side, the Exynos 2200 uses Armv9 cores: one high-powered Cortex-X2 “flagship core,” three Cortex-A710 cores for balanced performance, and four more efficient Cortex-A510 cores. There’s also an upgraded NPU that Samsung says offers twice the performance of its predecessor.
The Exynos 2200’s image signal processor (ISP) architecture has been redesigned to support the latest image sensors for ultra-high resolution of up to 200 megapixels (MP). At 30 frames-per-second (fps), the ISP supports up to 108 MP in single camera mode, and 64+36 MP in dual camera mode. It can also connect up to seven individual image sensors and drive four concurrently for advanced multi-camera setups. For video recording, the ISP supports up to 4K HDR (or 8K) resolution.
Exynos 2200 integrates a fast 3GPP Release 16 5G modem supporting both sub-6GHz and mmWave (millimeter Wave) spectrum bands. With E-UTRAN New Radio – Dual Connectivity (EN-DC), which utilizes both 4G LTE and 5G NR signals, the modem can boost the speed up to 10Gbps.
Samsung’s highest-end 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 likely have to wait until the presumptive Galaxy S22 is in our hands to find out if AMD’s technology translates into a meaningful leap forward in mobile GPU performance.
