Samsung Exynos 2200 chip announced with AMD ray tracing GPU; likely to power S22 series in India

Samsung on Tuesday announced Exynos 2200, its next-gen flagship mobile system-on-chip that’s likely to power the upcoming Galaxy S22 series. There’s a lot of new stuff in here, obviously, but the chip’s biggest headlining feature is that it packs AMD graphics. The Exynos 2200 in fact is the first mobile processor with a GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 2, the same architecture that lies at the heart of consoles like the PlayStation 5 and plethora of gaming PCs and laptops.

Does this mean the Galaxy S22 series will boast console-like graphics? We don’t know, yet, but the premise is surely intriguing. The GPU, inside the Exynos 2200 chip that Samsung is calling “Xclipse”, will support ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS) “previously only available on PCs, laptops and consoles,” Samsung says. More importantly, it’s the first of “multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs.”

Moving on, the Exynos 2200 will be among the first mobile chips to integrate Arm’s new v9 CPU cores. It will have an improved tri-cluster structure made up of a single powerful Cortex-X2 flagship-core, three high-performing Cortex-A710 big-cores, and four power-efficient Cortex-A510 little-cores. The 8-core chip will be based on 4-nanometer (nm) EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) process technology.

The upgraded NPU inside it is said to offer 2x performance with FP16 (16bit floating point) support. The redesigned image signal processor (ISP) meanwhile, can support up to 200MP camera sensors and connect “up to seven individual image sensors and drive four concurrently for advanced multi-camera setups.” Support for up to 144Hz refresh rate displays with HDR10+ playback is also provided. The 5G modem inside is faster, too.

The Exynos 2200 is in mass production at the time of writing and is very likely to debut inside the Galaxy S22 series expected to launch sometime in February. The batch heading to India has a very high probability of being powered by this chip. The S21 series was powered by the Exynos 2100 in India. Samsung also chose to launch the S21 FE 5G with the same chip while elsewhere the phone packs the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. The Exynos 2100 showed, finally, that Exynos could compete with Qualcomm and therefore expectations will be sky-high with its successor.

Samsung was supposed to launch the Exynos 2200 earlier, on January 11 to be more specific but the day came and went without any announcement. This raised speculations that Samsung had run into production issues, and hence delays, with some online reports suggesting the new Exynos was not performing optimally enough. Then there were reports that Samsung would launch it during the Galaxy S22 Unpacked. The AMD partnership was first announced back in 2019 but it was only last year the duo confirmed it was working on an RDNA 2-based Exynos chip.