Samsung announces Exynos 2200 SoC with AMD RDNA 2 architecture

(Image Courtesy: Samsung)

Samsung has announced the first mobile processor with hardware ray-tracing capabilities. The premium mobile processor has a GPU that Samsung co-developed with AMD on the company's RDNA 2 graphics architecture, which enables features like ray-tracing that were previously limited to desktop Graphics Processing Units (GPU).

The GPU is called Xclipse and Samsung calls it a "one-of-a-kind hybrid graphics processor," that it says is capable of advanced hardware-accelerated features like variable rate shading and ray-tracing. This is possible due to AMD's RDNA 2 graphics architecture.

Also Read: Mobile gamers rejoice! Samsung may soon bring raytracing-enabled Exynos SoC in partnership with AMD

Variable rate shading is a process utilised by more powerful desktop GPUs that allows game developers to control the quality of what players see on screen. It automatically adjusts image quality according to the player's field of view, lowering quality on textures and objects, that are not in the player's view, improving performance.

Ray-tracing seeks to emulate the way light interacts with objects in real-life, using complex calculations to simulate light rays that bounce off in-game objects.

The firsts don't end there; Exynos 2200 will be among the first SoCs to use ARM v9 CPU cores. It has two Cortex-X2 cores for performance, three Cortex-A710 cores that strike a happy middle ground and four Cortex-A510 cores for power efficiency.

There will also be a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that will speed up machine learning and AI-based tasks.

Also Read: Delayed Samsung Exynos 2200 chipset will now debut alongside Galaxy S22 series

Samsung says that compared to the Exynos 2100, the 2200 offers double the performance, allowing for more calculations in parallel, thanks to the improved CPU, GPU and NPU.

As for cameras, the Exynos 2200 supports up to a 200-megapixel single camera with 8K video. It also supports phone displays up to 4K at a refresh rate of 120Hz or QHD+ at a refresh rate of 144Hz.

It also supports the latest LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 for storage. There is also a 5G modem on-board that works on both sub-6GHz and mmWave. There is support for all major standards and satellites for GPS, as well.