Samsung brings console graphics and 8K videos to smartphones via Exynos 2200

Samsung unveiled its latest flagship chip Exynos 2200 after a week delay. The system-on-chip (SoC) from the South Koreans is the first in its series with an integrated graphics unit from AMD. The manufacturer should of course use the chip in its own high-end smartphones. This is where the product competes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which will power most high-end devices in the Android space. With the Exynos, Samsung wants to stand out from the crowd – especially the many Chinese suppliers.

The new SoC definitely offers the necessary potential for this, but whether the differences will really be noticed by most users will have to be seen in the concrete implementations in particular. With the new Exynos 2200, Samsung can exploit the strengths of its own production facilities and manufacture the chip in a 4-nanometer process with Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV). The core of the processor is a CPU unit with eight cores, which deviates from the usual principle of dividing it into four energy-efficient and four powerful cores. Instead, there is now a three-way split: Four energy-efficient Cortex-A510 cores from ARM are available for everyday tasks.

If necessary, three Cortex-A710 performance cores switch on. If even more power is needed, the Cortex-X2 can boost the performance even further. The graphics unit is an RDNA 2 architecture from AMD. So far, this has only been used in notebooks, PCs and game consoles and is now intended to equip smartphones with comparable graphics capabilities. However, the module is not always active due to its higher energy requirement. The additional Xclipse GPU usually takes care of the task of graphics display in everyday use.

Camera Support

Of course, the Exynos 2200 also has its own NPU, which is very contemporary, i.e. a computing unit that is designed for the demands of AI applications and does more than its predecessor. The SoS also contains a 5G mobile modem that basically supports all current specifications and thus theoretically enables bandwidths of up to 10 gigabits per second. Samsung is also adding an Integrated Secure Element (iSE) to the Exynos 2200, a separate unit in which security-related information such as cryptographic keys is stored.

The new chip supports cooperation with camera modules that have a resolution of up to 200 megapixels. With video recordings, up to 108 megapixels can be processed at a frame rate of 30 fps, which is unlikely to happen in practice. The fact that at least the SoC supports the recording of videos with 8K resolution or with 4K HDR is more relevant here. The integrated hardware accelerators can encode 8K videos at up to 60 fps and 4K content at up to 120 fps. In practice, the new chip will probably be seen for the first time in the new Galaxy S22 smartphones.