Taking to Twitter, Samsung introduced the Exynos 2200 with its new AMD-powered “Xclipse” GPU. The chip itself is pretty bog-standard flagship stuff. It has one Cortex-X2 core doing the heavy lifting, three Cortex-A710 cores performance, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores to manage power. This layout is similar to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Mediatek‘s Dimensity 9000. However, as multiple benchmarks suggest, a similar core config does not mean these all perform equally.
— Samsung Exynos (@SamsungExynos) January 18, 2022
The rundown
Without a doubt, the GPU inside the Exynos 2200 is the star of the show. Samsung has partnered up with AMD to develop the new “Xclipse 920” GPU that is supposed to be the GPU ever put inside a smartphone. It’s based on AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture, the same tech that’s powering the PlayStation 5 and current-gen AMD Radeon GPUs. Samsung says this new GPU should offer console-quality graphics on smartphone and mark the first true revolution in smartphone graphics. Xclipse 920 also features ray tracing and variable rate shading, both of which are genuinely exciting additions and being seen for the first time on a smartphone. Where ray tracing aims to provide higher visual fidelity by producing realistic lighting in games at the cost of a few frames, variable rate shading allows developers to apply lower shading to areas of the game where it won’t be noticeable, in return saving some power which would result in better FPS. We didn’t get any other details on the GPU aside from fancy marketing lingo and leaked benchmarks don’t give us gaming numbers either so we can’t tell if Samsung’s claims are actually justified. Furthermore, the Exynos 2200 is built on Samsung’s own 4nm process node which is pretty much as bleeding-edge as you can get right now. Though, Samsung’s fabs don’t have a particularly good history of being competitively dense compared to their rivals, so only time will tell if the performance holds up (spoiler: it kinda does not). The Exynos 2200 also has an NPU to assist in image processing which should result in better photos and videos. Along with that, the chip can support sensors up to 200MP with the ability to shoot 8K video at 60FPS. On top of that, it can power up to a 4K display with a 120Hz refresh rate (144Hz for 2K) with support for 10-bit HDR+ for sharp and vivid colors. Apart from that, it’s nothing exciting really. The SoC has further support for all the expected features like LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage, alongside both sub-6Ghz and mmWave 5G and all GPS standards for navigation. Samsung did not gives us any solid info on how this chip compares to its predecessor or its rivals. All we got a simple spec sheet so there’s not much to talk about. Exynos 2200 is currently in mass production, according to Samsung. There is no release date in sight but all things point towards it debuting in the upcoming Galaxy S22 series which will be revealed on February 6th. Other companies, like Vivo, could also implement the chip inside their phones like they’ve done in the past but we’ll have to wait and see if that happens. Read the full press release pertaining to this announcement here.
