Samsung Exynos 2200 with AMD GPU, ray tracing, 2X faster NPU announced

Samsung Exynos 2200 is finally official, after weeks of confusion over its existence and doubts over its anticipated debut in Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S22 line of flagship phones. The company has unveiled the new top-of-the-line chipset through a global release and claimed that it brings significant enhancements to mobile gaming, social media app use and smartphone photography.

The new flagship processor by Samsung has been made with the company's 4-nanometre EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) node. The Exynos 2200 comes with a new GPU called Xclipse, which is based on AMD RDNA 2 graphics technology. Samsung says that the new technology leads to "enhanced graphics and AI performance" during mobile gaming.

Some of the advanced features that the Xclipse brings to the Exynos 2200 are hardware-accelerated ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS). Samsung points out that these features were previously only available on PCs, laptops and consoles and that this is the first time that they will be seen on a mobile processor.

While ray tracing produces realistic lighting effects for graphically rendered scenes in games, variable-rate shading is a technique that optimizes GPU workload. Samsung says that the inclusion of these features on its Exynos 2200 is their industry-first appearance on a mobile processor. Other than this, the Xclipse GPU also comes with technologies like advanced multi-IP governor (AMIGO) to enhance overall performance and efficiency.

In addition to an improved GPU performance, the Exynos 2200 also comes with Arm's latest Armv9 CPU cores for mobile communication. Samsung says that it allows "a substantial improvement over Armv8 in terms of security and performance."

The Exynos 2200 is an octa-core CPU that is designed in a tri-cluster structure. It comprises one powerful Arm Cortex-X2 flagship-core, three performance and efficiency balanced Cortex-A710 big-cores and four Cortex-A510 little-cores for power efficiency.

There are, of course, other enhancements too. The Exynos 2200 comes with an upgraded NPU or neural processing unit that now offers more powerful on-device artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung says that the new NPU is twice as fast as the one on the Exynos 2100 and hence allows "more calculations in parallel."

The NPU also works in tandem with the image signal processor (ISP) architecture for enhanced photographs. It is able to detect the subject in the focus of the camera and automatically adjusts the settings like colour, white balance, exposure and more. Other than the NPU, the photography aspect of the Exynos 2200 can take care of up to 108-megapixel in single camera mode, 64+36 megapixel in dual camera mode, up to seven individual image sensors and up to 4K HDR (or 8K) resolution.

Samsung says that the Exynos 2200 is already in mass production. So we can expect to see it on the Galaxy S22 series, after all, which is due to mark its debut by early February.