As the tech world awaits the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy S22 series, one big question that’s still unanswered is the status of the processor powering it. There was much hype for the upcoming Exynos 2200 system-on-chip, with it supposed to be the result of Samsung’s partnership with AMD. In fact, Samsung themselves added to the hype, tweeting this back on the 30th of December last year with the bold claim that ‘playtime is over’. The now-deleted tweet also announced the launch date for the new Exynos chip: 11 January 2022.
Well the 11th has come and go, but there’s still no Exynos 2200 in sight. Serial Samsung tipster Ice Universe claims that internally, Samsung has postponed the release of the Exynos 2200 chip. In fact, he claims that Samsung has been having issues with their Exynos chips since last year, with a planned midrange chip called Exynos 1200 cancelled before its supposed launch date of November 2021. There was even speculation that the situation with the Exynos 2200 chip was so bad that Samsung might end up using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip in all of their Galaxy S22 series phones, instead of reserving it just for the US and China. Ice Universe though has said on Weibo that the Exynos 2200 will still be used in several countries, however Qualcomm’s chip will be in more phones than previous generations.
Samsung, for their part, has since responded to the no-show of the Exynos 2200 chip. The Korean giants said that they are ‘planning to unveil the new application processor at the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone’. They didn’t say which smartphone they were referring to, but it’s perhaps safe to say that it’ll be the Galaxy S22 lineup. When quizzed about the missed Exynos 2200 launch date meanwhile, Samsung’s spokesperson merely replied that there are no problems with the processor’s production and performance.
In response, Ice Universe would post on Weibo claiming that the issue with the Exynos 2200 appears to be related to the AMD GPU. Specifically, the Exynos 2200’s GPU appears to be having trouble keeping temperatures low. Due to the heat output, Samsung is unable to get the GPU to his its target frequency of 1.9GHz, with the chip only getting reasonable thermal performance when clocked to a mere 1.29GHz, a 38% difference in clock speed. Samsung will apparently try and raise the clock speeds back to at least 1.49GHz though. Adding salt to the wounds, the issue has also apparently caused some infighting within Samsung’s departments.
It’s perhaps a little perplexing that Samsung didn’t just announce a delay, rather than continuing to defend themselves. Nevertheless, the situation with the Exynos 2200 chip seems to be reaching a new all time low. A shame then, considering the huge expectations everyone had for the partnership with AMD and the Exynos 2200.
