Samsung’s Exynos 2200 chip brings ray-tracing to your smartphone

Samsung’s first chip produced from the partnership with AMD has been announced. The Samsung Exynos 2200 brings AMD RDNA 2 to mobile devices, bringing ray tracing and “console-quality graphics.”

The AMD GPU is the big news here, paired with “cutting edge ARM cores.” The announcement brings a host of big claims, including power efficiency and gaming prowess.

Samsung hasn’t officially said where the Exynos 2200 will first debut. That said, we’re pretty confident it will be in the Galaxy S22, as European listings for that device state the Exynos 2200 as the processor used.

Manufactured on Samsung’s 4nm process, the Exynos 2200 has a hybrid configuration. The latest Armv9 cores are used, with one high-powered Cortex-X2 core, three Cortex-A710 cores for balanced performance, and four efficient Cortex-A510 cores.

Samsung also includes an NPU for machine-learning boost and supports camera sensors up to 200MP. Detailed specifications on the RDNA 2 cores will have to wait. Samsung decided to only mention some of the capabilities of the new GPU, like ray tracing and variable rate shading.

We saw a leaked benchmark for the Samsung Exynos 2200 last week, and it was underwhelming. The leaker, @TheGalox_, did caution that the benchmark chip didn’t include the “Super core (X2).” That core was specifically mentioned by all of Samsung’s marketing material; so we’re waiting for official benchmark results before we comment further.

The bad news? If you live in the US, you probably won’t be able to easily buy a device using one. Samsung usually uses the Exynos line in its Galaxy S flagships outside the US; with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips used in the US market.

You could buy one from outside the US, and import it. That would forgo any manufacturer’s warranty, and there’s no guarantee it will be fully supported on US cellular networks, however.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere. His hobbies include photography, animation, and hoarding Reddit gold.