Samsung Exynos 2200: Smartphone SoC with ray tracing presented
Samsung has unveiled the Exynos 2200. The system-on-a-chip brings greatly improved graphics performance and the fastest 5G speed to date.
So before the Samsung Galaxy S22 after all: Samsung has unveiled its new system-on-a-chip (SoC). The Exynos 2200 is called a "game changer" in a press release. Not only is the Exynos supposed to bring the usual "faster, better, more frugal", but also a feature that makes gamers sit up and take notice: Raytracing.
What is ray tracing?
Ray tracing calculates in real time how light behaves in a video game. What simply happens in the real world is a complex calculation in the computer and requires a lot of computing power. That's why ray tracing was previously reserved for PCs or laptops with special graphics cards.
Now, thanks to Samsung, ray tracing is also supposed to find its way into smartphones. The new Exynos is supposed to be able to calculate the incidence of light on objects in the game in real time. It takes the color and texture of the impact object into account and creates a realistic reflection from it.
An ARM-based SoC
AMD RDNA 2 is responsible for ray tracing and variable rate shading. Samsung has licensed the architecture from AMD and extended it with its own components. The result is the Samsung Xclipse. The gaming chip is part of the Exynos 2200 SoC.
A system-on-a-chip is more than just "the processor". There is more to an SoC than just a processor and the smartphone equivalent of a graphics card. In most flagship SoCs there is also a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is primarily responsible for artificial intelligence tasks. The new NPU in the Exynos 2200 is supposed to deliver double the performance compared to the predecessor.
The modem of the Exynos 2200 is supposed to bring a performance of up to 10 Gbps. That would be top performance and a step further towards a smartphone modem that can exploit 5G.
More in the near future
- Video recording in 8K at 60 frames per second.
- 4K at 120 frames per second
- Manufactured using the 4nm EUV process
- Octa-core CPU, led by the one ARM Cortex-X2, supported by Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 CPUs.
The Exynos 2200 does not seem to be affected by the chip crisis. It is currently in mass production. It is currently assumed that the Exynos 2200 will be used in the Samsung Galaxy S22.
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