Samsung has announced the Exynos 2200, its latest in-house mobile processor for smartphones. The unveiling was supposed to happen last week, but Samsung bailed on the last minute, claiming business reasons. The benchmark results are not out yet, but here is everything we know at the moment.
The newly announced Exynos 2200 has become 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 colour characteristic of light rays as they bounce off the surface, ray tracing produces realistic lighting effects for graphically rendered scenes. This technology is primarily used to make lighting in games to feel more natural.
The business relationship with AMD, who are primarily known for making PC hardware, has been long in the making, with the two companies signing a licensing deal as early as 2019. They then went silent as development took centre stage before AMD confirming in 2021 that the next Samsung’s flagship system-on-a-chip (SoC) would have RDNA 2.
Rumours started floating around that the Exynos 2200 was facing performance issues, more so overheating that made Samsung to postpone its announcement that was initially scheduled for last week, But this has not yet been substantiated. It is worth noting that Exynos chipsets have a history of overheating, but we will have to hold our horses until the first results of the benchmarks are out before ruling the chipset as a failure.
Samsung has also referred to the Exynos 2200 as the Xclipse GPU, with their official blog claiming that its performance lies somewhere in between that of a console and a mobile graphic processor.
“The Xclipse GPU is a one-of-a-kind hybrid graphic processor that is positioned between the console and the mobile graphic processor. Xclipse is the combination of ‘X’ that represents Exynos, and the word ‘eclipse’. Like an eclipse, the Xclipse GPU will bring an end to the old era of mobile gaming and mark the start of an exciting new chapter.” Samsung on its official blog.
The blog also states that the Xclipse GPU is the first of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs. This basically means that we might be seeing the Xclipse name for a long time in the foreseeable future.
Shifting gears to 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. This grouping of cores into three groups, high performance, balanced and efficient ones is getting common in premium chipsets, with Qualcomm and Google already doing it on their respective chipsets.
Samsung also mentions an upgraded NPU(Network Processing Unit) that it claims will offer twice the performance of its predecessor, while the ISP architecture is designed to support camera sensors of up to 200 megapixels.
Samsung’s Exynos chipsets are normally used in the Galaxy S series, one of the company’s flagship series. If this trend is to go by, the first Samsung smartphone to rock the Exynos 2200 will be the Galaxy S22, which is still unannounced.
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