Samsung Reveals First Smartphone Chip With AMD Ray Tracing GPU

Samsung has announced the Exynos 2200, its new in-house mobile processor for smartphones. It is the first mobile system on a chip to include a GPU with AMD's RDNA 2 graphics architecture, enabling features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

The collaboration with AMD has been a long time in the making. The two companies first announced a licensing agreement in 2019, then AMD confirmed last year that Samsung's "next flagship mobile SoC" would use RDNA 2. In addition, Samsung recently teased an announcement event for the Exynos 2200 that was supposed to take place on January 11 but was mysteriously delayed.

The Exynos 2200 is manufactured using Samsung's 4nm EUV process. Samsung is branding this GPU "Xclipse," and AMD's senior vice president of Radeon GPU technology David Wang says in a statement that it's "the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics on Exynos SoCs."

On the CPU side, the Exynos 2200 uses Armv9 cores:

- A high-powered "flagship" Cortex-X2 core

- Three Cortex-A710 cores for balanced performance

- Four more efficient Cortex-A510 cores

There's also an upgraded NPU that Samsung says offers twice the performance of its predecessor, and the ISP architecture is designed to support up to 200-megapixel camera sensors, one of which Samsung announced last year.

Samsung's higher-end Exynos chips typically find their way into the company's flagship Galaxy S series of phones. However, models sold in the US and other markets use Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs. Other phone makers like Vivo occasionally use Exynos chips on their own devices. Still, we'll likely have to wait until the presumed Galaxy S22 is in our hands to determine if AMD's technology translates into a significant leap forward in phone performance Mobile GPU.