Samsung finally introduces AMD RDNA 2-powered Exynos 2200

Samsung left us all hanging with uncertainty last week, when the Korean tech giant was a no show at its own planned press conference. Now in a newsroom blogpost, Samsung has officially introduced its new high-end mobile Exynos 2200 processor featuring AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture.

Samsung has dubbed the new hybrid GPU, Xclipse, getting the X from the Exynos processor while the eclipse idea comes from how it sits between the mobile GPU and the console. Thanks to AMD’s RDNA 2 technology, Samsung is boasting the Xclipse can handle hardware accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading, like higher end consoles and PCs but on a mobile device. 

“AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture extends power-efficient, advanced graphics solutions to PCs, laptops, consoles, automobiles and now to mobile phones. Samsung’s Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs,” said David Wang, Senior Vice President of Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. “We can’t wait for mobile phone customers to experience the great gaming experiences based on our technology collaboration.”

While RDNA 2 is a first for mobile devices, the rest of the specs on this chip are still looking impressive, if a little more normal for the market. Inside the Exynos 2200 is a tri-cluster arrangement of octa-core Arm v9 CPUs. The eight cores are split over a single Arm Cortex X2 core focussing on high performance, four Cortex-A510 power-efficient little cores, and three Cortex-A710 cores that sit somewhere between the two. 

This seems similar in structure to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC which also features an octa-core hybrid architecture with a single 3.0 GHz Cortex-X2 core, three Cortex-A710 cores at 2.5 GHz and four Cortex-A510 cores at 1.8 GHz. Though, full comparisons will have to wait as we don’t have any details on clock speeds for the Exynos 2200. 

Good mobile chips are always great news for gaming, especially as PC gaming gets more mobile with things like the Steam Deck. Plus, AMD putting RDNA 2 out there into more devices of any size is only going to strengthen the platform. On the other side of things Apple’s M1 silicon is continuing to impress in power so mobile devices on all fronts is getting increasingly competitive.

Samsung Unpacked for the new lines of Galaxy phones is due on February 8, assuming the company shows up. We should learn more about the Exynos 2200 then.