After some eyebrow-raising backtracking on the initial 11 January launch, Samsung has announced its latest Exynos System-on-Chip (SoC). The Exynos 2200 should’ve been announced a week ago but the announcement was pushed back to today to coincide with the S22 launch. That’s according to a Samsung official who spoke to GSMArena.
This led to some speculation circulating that perhaps the new, still-to-be-announced S22 range would feature Snapdragon SoCs. Historically, only the models released in the US came with Snapdragon SoCs. The rest of the world, South Africa included, received devices with Samsung’s usually worse-performing Exynos chips. But things might be different this year.
The Exynos 2200 with Samsung Xclipse 920 GPU
The latest SoC from Samsung is the first to benefit from the partnership with AMD in the form of AMD’s RDNA 2 GPU architecture. This is the same architecture you’ll find in AMD’s RX 6000 series desktop GPUs, the Xbox Series S and X and the PS5 (which is still facing stock shortages). That makes this the first smartphone SoC to feature hardware-accelerated ray-tracing support and how Samsung can say it’s bringing console quality to smartphones, without fibbing.
If you feel out of the loop, ray-tracing is a rendering technique that simulates and tracks every ray of light produced by a light source. It then algorithmically predicts how those rays interact with the objects they hit and reflect off.
Now we just need to wait for developers to include the tech in games. Ray-traced Candy Crush is going to look incredible.
The rest of the system
While the new GPU tech is the biggest news from the new chipset, it still features the other bits that have also hopefully been improved on. For the CPU, Samsung moved to the new ARMv9 architecture and CPU layout. It features one superfast Cortex-X2 prime core, three Cortex-A710 performance cores, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores for a total of eight.
Samsung didn’t say how fast these cores can go exactly. It’s better to wait for third-party benchmarks anyway.
The Exynos 2200 will also feature an NPU to do the AI and ML (machine learning) heavy lifting and an Integrated Secure Element (iSE) to keep things securely locked away from prying eyes.
For connectivity, the new SoC will support both sub-6GHz and the faster mmWave flavours of 5G.
Samsung’s latest chip also features an improved Image Signal Processor (ISP). This one will support camera resolutions up to 200MP, now we just someone to make a sensor that big. For video recording and playback, the Exynos 2200 supports some fairly big numbers. You can shoot 4K HDR content at 120fps or 8K at 30fps with this chip or watch 4K 240fps or 8K 60fps content.
According to the Korean tech maker, this chip has entered mass production. But it also said it would release this chip when it announced the new handsets. The chip is here but there’s no word of any S22 devices from the company just yet. It looks like we’ll have to wait until the 9th of February to see what Samsung will say then.