The big picture: Samsung's Exynos 2200 chipset was supposed to be an exciting reveal, but the official announcement is surprisingly quiet about details like clock speeds or the performance capabilities of the AMD RDNA 2-powered GPU. The two companies claim this is the first chipset to bring ray tracing capabilities to smartphones, but it's not yet clear when we'll be able to see it in action.
Samsung was supposed to announce the Exynos 2200 SoC for smartphones on January 11, but for reasons we have yet to learn, it chose to postpone it to this week. Even so, the company did so much more quietly than expected for such a hyped chipset that was supposed to revolutionize smartphone gaming.
At the heart of this anticipated mobile chipset is an 8-core CPU with one "flagship" Cortex-X2 core, three performance Cortex-A710 cores, and four energy-efficient Cortex-A510 cores. It's built on the same 4nm EUV process node as Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Mobile Platform, and also features support for quad-channel LPDDR5 RAM, UFS 3.1 storage, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and 5G connectivity with speeds of up to 10 Gbps.
However, the more interesting characteristic of the Exynos 2200 SoC is the integration of a "Eclipse" GPU based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. Samsung says this will enable hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading on mobile games, and the branding is supposed to symbolize the end of the old era of mobile gaming. The new GPU also supports displays with refresh rates of up to 144 Hz.
Other notable features include a new neural processing unit (NPU) that has double the performance of its predecessor, and an image signal processor (ISP) that supports up to 200-megapixel sensors and 8K video capture. Unlike the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the Exynos 2200 also features an advanced multi-format codec (MFC) that integrates an AV1 decoder.
Samsung says the new chipset is currently in mass production, so it's likely it'll be featured in the company's upcoming Galaxy S22 lineup.