Samsung declared the launch of first smartphone processor with AMD ray tracing GPU

Samsung has unveiled the Exynos 2200, a new mobile CPU developed in-house for smartphones. It’s the first mobile system-on-a-chip to have an AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture GPU, allowing features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing to be enabled.

The partnership with AMD has been in the works for a long time. The two firms first announced a licencing agreement in 2019, and AMD confirmed last year that RDNA 2 would be used in Samsung’s “next flagship mobile SoC.” Samsung had previously teased an announcement event for the Exynos 2200 for January 11th, but it was inexplicably rescheduled.

Samsung’s 4nm EUV technology is used to make the Exynos 2200. Samsung calls this GPU “Xclipse,” and AMD’s SVP of Radeon GPU Technology David Wang claims it’s “the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exyno.s SoCs”

On the CPU side, the Exynoss 2200 employs Armv9 cores, including one high-performance Cortex-X2 “flagship core,” three balanced Cortex-A710 cores, and four more efficient Cortex-A510 cores. The ISP architecture is designed to accommodate camera sensors with up to 200 megapixels, which Samsung revealed last year. There’s also an updated NPU that Samsung claims gives twice the performance of its predecessor.

Although models marketed in the United States and certain other markets use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs, Samsung’s highest-end Exynos CPUs normally make their way into the company’s flagship Galaxy S phone series. Other phone makers, such as Vivo, occasionally use Exynos CPUs in their own smartphones, but we’ll have to wait till we get our hands on the rumoured Galaxy S22 to see if AMD’s technology translates into a significant improvement in mobile GPU performance.