Samsung clears the air about Exynos 2200 performance and production rumors
Samsung is still very much planning on unveiling its next high-end chip, which seemingly will be called the Exynos 2200, early this year, according to established news outlet Business Korea (via TechInsider).
It is the usual practice for Samsung to outfit the American and Chinese variants of its premium Galaxy smartphones with Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon SoCs, and the rest of the variants get home-brewed Exynos chipsets. To make its chips more competitive against Qualcomm and Apple's offerings, Samsung struck a deal with AMD to bring console-level gaming to its handsets. The company had given the impression that the AMD-powered Exynos 2200 would be announced on January 11, but that date came and went with nary a sign of the processor.
On top of that, the South Korean giant deleted the social media post about the announcement. This left many of us wondering about the fate of the chip.
Will the Exynos 2200 not be all that we thought it would be?
When Samsung first confirmed that it had teamed up with AMD to make a mobile GPU, expectations were sky-high, with some reports going as far to say that the chip wouldn't just thrash Qualcomm's flagship chip, but also close the gap with Apple's Bionic processors that underpin its iPhones.
This enthusiasm wasn't reflected in recent reports, one of which said that the generation to generation performance improvement may disappoint. Last year's Exynos 2100, which fuels the Galaxy S21 series, offered 30 percent better CPU performance and 40 percent improved graphics when compared to the predecessor Exynos 990. The Exynos 2200 is only expected to provide 5 percent and 17 percent better CPU performance and graphics, respectively.
To cut Samsung some slack, the Exynos 2100 was its first chip to feature Arm's cores instead of its own CPU designs and it was also based on the advanced 5nm process, but it's harder to explain the raw GPU number, considering the whole point of switching out Arm's Mali GPU for AMD graphics was to considerably improve performance.
There were also some reports that said that the company was experiencing production issues and it may equip most of the Galaxy S22 variants with the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip.
Exynos 2200 will be announced alongside the Galaxy S22 series
Of course, it could be that what we are hearing is not based in truth, and in either case, we can expect to find more next month. Per Business Korea, the Exynos 2200 will be introduced alongside the Galaxy S22 series, which will be announced on February 8. A company official has refuted the rumors about production and performance issues and has assured consumers that problems exhibited by the Exynos 2100 such as excessive heat generation have been taken care of.
One thing that that doesn't add up is that in addition to the North American and Chinese models, the Indian version of the Galaxy S22 will also be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Samsung usually equips the Indian models with its Exynos processors.
This indicates things perhaps aren't going as smoothly as Samsung would have liked. The company had allegedly planned to release a midrange processor in November but had to postpone the release and according to a now-deleted strongly-worded tweet by a reliable insider, the Exynos 2200 will be inferior to the competition.
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