The tech industry is moving towards purpose-built, in-house designed chipsets, with the likes of Apple and Google launching their own chip platforms over the last couple of years. In order to compete, Samsung Electronics has introduced its first mobile processor powered by AMD graphics so that it can take on the gaming performance of Apple’s own silicon.
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The new Exynos 2200 processor is built using Samsung’s most advanced 4nm fabrication process and is the industry’s first mobile chip with hardware support for ray tracing, reserved for high-end PC graphics cards until now. It is an advanced approach that creates more realistic lighting effects and graphics fidelity.
The new graphics chip is built on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture, dubbed Xclipse, and is being hailed as the bridge in performance between console and mobile performance, according to Samsung. The Korean tech giant wants to bring the high-end gaming experience to smartphones, as it is currently the biggest gaming segment in the world.
“Samsung’s Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos,” said David Wang, senior vice president at AMD. The Exynos range is Samsung’s in-house chipset it uses in its devices in certain markets, instead of the Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets used by the majority of the industry.
The eight-core Exynos 2200 system-on-chip, now in mass production, is among the first to use the newest Armv9 central processing cores and includes an onboard neural processing unit focused on artificial intelligence tasks. The NPU’s performance has doubled this generation, according to Samsung. 5G wireless connectivity is also built into the chip, which will sit at the heart of Android smartphones this year.
It will be interesting to see which devices they choose to launch with the new chipset and if they will drop the high-end Snapdragon chipsets altogether.
