Samsung has introduced a new in-house mobile CPU for smartphones, the Exynos 2200. Because it has a GPU with AMD’s rDNA 2 graphics architecture, it can do things like hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
The relationship with AMD has been in the works for quite some time. In 2019, the two companies announced that they were going to work together. Last year, AMD said that Samsung’s “next flagship mobile SoC” would use RDNA 2. Samsung recently teased a launch event for the Exynos 2200, which was originally scheduled to take place on January 11th but was unexpectedly postponed due to some difficulties.
The Exynos 2200 is built using Samsung’s 4nm EUV manufacturing process. According to AMD’s SVP of Radeon GPU technology, David Wang, Samsung’s GPU is the first in a series of anticipated generations of AMD RDNA graphics to be integrated into Exynos SoCs. Samsung is marketing this GPU as a “game-changer.”
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When it comes to the CPU, the Exynos 2200 makes use of Armv9 cores, including one high-performance Cortex-X2 “flagship core,” three Cortex-A710 cores for balanced performance, and four more efficient Cortex-A510 cores. The Exynos 2200 has a total of six Cortex-A510 cores. Besides the new NPU, Samsung says its ISP architecture can handle camera sensors with up to 200 megapixels. One of these was announced by the company last year.
Samsung’s most powerful Exynos chips are usually found in the company’s most popular Galaxy S phones. Models sold in the US and some other countries use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs. Other phone makers, like Vivo, sometimes use Exynos chips in their own phones. We’ll likely have to wait until the presumptive Galaxy S22 comes out to see if AMD’s technology makes a big difference in mobile GPU performance.
