Samsung announces Exynos 2200 with AMD’s RDNA 2 technology but vital questions are left unanswered

Before the Galaxy S22 series is released, Samsung has finally announced its Exynos 2200 mobile processor. This marks a new milestone as Samsung has teamed up with AMD to develop the industry’s first hardware-accelerated ray tracing on mobile. The GPU on the Exynos 2200 promises to offer “console-quality graphics on mobile”.

Similar to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 gen 1, the Exynos 2200 is a tri-cluster octa-core chip based on a 4nm fabrication process. It also has one ARM Cortex X2 prime core, three ARM Cortex A710 performance cores, and four ARM Cortex A510 cores for power efficiency. It also supports LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage.

In the graphics department, the new Exynos chip features an Xclipse GPU which Samsung claims to be a hybrid graphic processor that’s positioned between console and mobile graphics. The Xclipse uses AMD’s high-performance RDNA 2 architecture as its backbone and inherits advanced graphic features including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading that are normally found on PCs, laptops, and consoles.

AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group Senior Vice President David Wang said “AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture extends power-efficient, advanced graphics solutions to PCs, laptops, consoles, automobiles and now to mobile phones. Samsung’s Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs.”

“We can’t wait for mobile phone customers to experience the great gaming experiences based on our technology collaboration,” he added.

In the camera department, the built-in image signal processor (ISP) can support newer image sensors up to 200MP and it can record 30 fps up to 108MP in single-camera mode as well as 64MP + 36MP in dual-camera mode. Samsung also claims that the ISP is capable of connecting up to 7 individual image sensors and driving 4 sensors concurrently for a multi-camera setup. It also supports 8K video recording with up to 4K for HDR.

The chip’s multi-format codec is capable of decoding videos of 4K up to 240fps and 8K up to 60fps, as well as encoding 4K videos at 120fps or 8K at 30fps. For a smoother visual experience, it also supports HDR10+ and high refresh rates up to 144Hz.

As you would expect from a 2022 flagship mobile chip, it supports a wide array of 5G bands covering sub-6GHz and mmWave spectrum bands. There’s also support for 5G E-UTRAN New Radio Dual Connectivity (EN-DC) which uses 4G LTE and 5G NR signals to deliver speeds up to 10Gbps.

After missing its 11th January launch schedule, It has been speculated that the Exynos 2200 chip is marred by thermal issues. Interestingly, the Exynos 2200 announcement lacks any mention of performance improvements over its predecessor or competitor. Even on the spec sheet, Samsung didn’t reveal the clock speed figures for its CPU and GPU cores. It was speculated that the Exynos 2200’s GPU was meant to run at 1.9GHz but they had to decrease it to 1.29GHz due to overheating concerns. It isn’t clear if these issues have been solved and whether the Exynos 2200 chip is far superior to the flagship Snapdragon chip.

Previously, several sources have speculated that Samsung will be offering the Galaxy S22 with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip in all markets since there was no show from Samsung’s silicon division. Since the new chip is now official, there’s a high probability that Malaysia could be getting the Exynos 2200 variant for the upcoming Galaxy S22 series.

[ SOURCE 2 ]

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