Business Korea got a comment from Samsung where they said everything is fine and that there is no issues with production or performance—the two conclusions everyone would jump to justify the delay. Instead, the Samsung spokesperson mentioned that the company is planning to unveil the Exynos 2200 at the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone. It was not specified if this new smartphone is the Samsung Galaxy S22 series due for a February launch next month.
The buildup
The Exynos 2200 has been a hotly-anticipated release in the phone space as it marks the first real collaboration between a major PC-centric semiconductor company and a phone manufacturer. AMD lent its RDNA 2 chops to the Exynos 2200 which, in theory, should make for drastically better graphics performance since AMD is well-versed in that department and RDNA 2 is a potent architecture. This collab has also been a long-time coming as news of AMD and Samsung working together to make a mobile SoC with AMD’s graphical expertise came out back in 2019, yet we still don’t have the product in our hands. There have been countless leaks, reports and unofficial updates on what has been happening behind the scene and it all comes together to define today’s unexpected postponing. With a bombastic campaign started just days earlier, it seemed like Samsung was ready to unleash Exynos 2200 to the world with everything but a solid confirmation that Samsung Galaxy S22 was going to be powered by it. However, now that campaign has been smudged off the internet, all tweets deleted, all videos taken down, as if nothing had ever happened. All of this is obviously quite concerning. On January 10th, a whole two days before the event was supposed to happen, popular leaker Ice Universe came forward and already said that the Exynos 2200 has been delayed. They mentioned that Samsung LSI (the company’s chip-making division) has been struggling since last year on the development of Exynos. To back this up even further, Ice Universe explained how Exynos 1200 was supposed to release in November of last year but was canceled abruptly.
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) January 11, 2022
The punchline
Hours after Samsung bailed on its own Exynos 2200 announcement, they confirmed to Business Korea that there, in fact, has been a delay for the Exynos 2200 release, as mentioned above. But that’s literally all Samsung said. They didn’t give any reason for the delay nor did they explain why it was so last-minute and hastily done. This is where Ice Universe came to the rescue again with a somewhat-shocking revelation. The Exynos 2200 runs hot. Really hot. According to the leaker, the RDNA 2 GPU inside the chip was targeting a 1.9Ghz clock speed but it was running incredibly hot at that. Target frequencies lower than that are also a question mark as the integrated graphics are still toasty on those. Currently, 1.29Ghz is the frequency Samsung LSI is standing at with attempts to increase it to 1.49Ghz before release. Some have blamed the ARM X2 core as the culprit behind why the Exynos runs hot, but the X2 core is present inside the Dimensity 9000 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 as well, so it just seems that Samsung it struggling to fine-tune their chip. Of course, these are still just rumors but when Samsung themselves have not outlined a reason then everything being left to speculation seems deserved. Another leaker by the name of Dohyun Kim has even said that Exynos 2200 would completely miss its Galaxy S22 debut and that the entire series would be powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 across the world in all regions.
Exynos 2200 is G.O.N.E.(It might be released later, but I’m sure that it’s not going to be in Galaxy S22 series.) — Dohyun Kim (@dohyun854) January 11, 2022 There are contradictory rumors as well, of course. Many are saying that this nothing but a blip in the timeline and that the Galaxy S22 series will still be powered by the Exynos 2200. Business Korea speculates that the chip will be unveiled alongside the S22 at “Galaxy Unpacked 2022” in early February. So take all of this with a grain of salt and wait for official word from Samsung before taking either side. This AMD partnership was supposed to be a big comeback for Samsung Exynos after years of stagnating and falling behind the competition time and time again. Things were so bad that Samsung even dropped development of their own custom SoC cores in favor of just licensing ARM’s cores instead a few years ago. A new flagship chip with fresh AMD branding would’ve been a good image for Exynos and perhaps, maybe even its saving grace. But, with how things are looking right now, what was supposed to be a comeback has probably turned into a new low for Exynos.
