South Korean technology major Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled its first mobile processor powered by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) graphics in an effort to compete with archrival Apple Inc.'s iPhones' gaming capabilities.
The new Exynos 2200 CPU is manufactured utilising Samsung's most advanced 4nm fabrication process and is the industry's first mobile chip to handle ray tracing, an advanced technique to high-fidelity graphics that has gained traction in PC graphics cards, said the company.
Samsung describes the Xclipse graphics chip, which is based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, as bridging the gap between console and mobile performance. It is a one-of-a-kind hybrid graphic processor that is positioned between the console and the mobile graphic processor.
“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.
Samsung normally utilises its own Exynos CPUs in its top Galaxy devices in various areas, and it also licences its silicon to customers such as Vivo. Despite Samsung's benefit of being able to produce its own chips, Apple's self-designed A-series processors and Qualcomm Inc.'s Snapdragon portfolio have historically dominated the mobile marketplace.
The eight-core Exynos 2200 system-on-chip, which is already in mass production, is one of the first to use the latest Armv9 central processor cores and features an inbuilt neural processing unit dedicated to artificial intelligence activities. According to Samsung, the NPU's performance has doubled this iteration. Additionally, 5G wireless connectivity is embedded into the chip, which will power Android smartphones this year.
“As one of the first processors to incorporate the new Armv9 CPU cores, Samsung's Exynos 2200 takes advantage of Arm's Total Compute strategy and key security features, like Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), to deliver the purpose-built compute and specialized processing needed to power future mobile experiences,” said Rene Haas, President of IP Products Group (IPG) at Arm.
