Xclipse GPU Powered by AMD RDNA 2 Architecture
Samsung Electronics launched the Exynos 2200, a premium mobile application processor (AP) created in partnership with AMD, on Jan. 18. Samsung has collaborated with AMD for about two and a half years to develop the product. It will go into the Galaxy 22, which will be launched next month.
The Exynos 2200 is a freshly designed mobile processor with Samsung Xclipse graphics processing unit (GPU), which is based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. It runs on the most cutting-edge Arm®-based CPU cores available in the market today and an upgraded neural processing unit (NPU).
The Xclipse GPU is a one-of-a-kind hybrid graphic processor that is positioned between the console and the mobile graphic processor. With the high-performance AMD RDNA 2 architecture as its backbone, the Xclipse inherits advanced graphic features such as hardware accelerated ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS) that were previously only available on PCs, laptops and consoles.
Ray tracing is a revolutionary technology that closely simulates how light physically behaves in the real world. By calculating the movement and the color characteristic of light rays as they bounce off the surface, ray tracing produces realistic lighting effects for graphically rendered scenes. To offer the most immersive graphics and user experiences even on mobile, Samsung has collaborated with AMD to realize the industry’s first ever hardware-accelerated ray tracing on mobile GPU.
Variable rate shading is a technique that optimizes GPU workload by allowing developers to apply lower shading rate in areas where overall quality will not be affected. This gives GPU more room to work on areas that matter most to the gamers and improve frame-rate for smoother gameplay.
The Exynos 2200 is one of the first in the market to integrate Arm’s latest Armv9 CPU cores, which offer a substantial improvement over Armv8 in terms of security and performance, the two areas that are becoming critically important in today’s mobile communications devices.
The octa-core CPU of Exynos 2200 is designed in a tri-cluster structure made up of a single powerful Arm Cortex-X2 flagship-core, three performance and efficiency balanced Cortex-A710 big-cores and four power-efficient Cortex-A510 little-cores.
The Exynos 2200 offers more powerful on-device artificial intelligence (AI) with an upgraded NPU. The NPU’s performance has doubled compared to its predecessor, allowing more calculations in parallel and enhancing the AI performance. The NPU now offers much higher precision with FP16 (16bit floating point) support in addition to power efficient INT8 (8bit integer) and INT16.
The Exynos 2200 is produced through a 4-nm ultra-micro fabrication process.
The mobile AP market is expected to soar from US$29.6 billion in 2021 to US$41.9 billion in 2026. However, according to Strategy Analytics, Samsung Electronics’ market share in the smartphone AP market has recently fallen to a single digit. Samsung is pinning its hopes on the Exynos 2200.