Exynos 2200 to Power Galaxy S22 for Europe, Southeast Asia
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 application processor (AP) has been selected as the brain of the Galaxy S22 to be released in Korea. Until now, Samsung Electronics has used its own Exynos AP for its Galaxy S smartphones for the Korean market, but the practice has been broken. Industry insiders believe that the low popularity of Samsung Exynos APs among Korean consumers and their low production yield forced Samsung Electronics to choose the Qualcomm AP.
Samsung Electronics has used different APs for Galaxy S series for different markets. It has used Qualcomm's Snapdragon for smartphones to be sold in the United States and the Exynos for those to be sold in Korea. In addition, Snapdragon chips were used for smartphones for the Chinese market and Exynos chips powered those for the European market.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 AP will power the Galaxy S22 for the U.S. market, while Samsung’s Exynos 2200 will be adopted for products to be shipped to the European and Southeast Asian markets. This means that Samsung Electronics has made a different move from the previous practice.
The Exynos series is considered one of the important design assets in Samsung Electronics’ goal of becoming the No. 1 system semiconductor manufacturer in 2030. However, it has been pointed out that its performance is poor compared to its competitors Qualcomm Snapdragon and Apple A series. In addition, the Exynos 990 installed in the Galaxy S20 and others suffered the dishonor of being replaced by the Snapdragon due to a severe heat generation problem. In general, when a smartphone AP overheats, the smartphone system arbitrarily reduces its performance to lower heat.
Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics introduced their latest APs at the end of 2021 and in early 2022, respectively. Both are produced through Samsung Electronics’ 4nm fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) process.
Both APs were made based on a design structure created by Arm, a British semiconductor design company. They have somewhat different compositions. In addition, the biggest difference is that Qualcomm employs the Adreano of its own development as a graphics processing unit (GPU) and Samsung Electronics is using the Xclipse developed in collaboration with AMD. Only the Exynos is loaded with a neural network processing unit (NPU) that helps artificial intelligence (AI) operations.
The biggest feature of the Exynos 2200’s graphics performance loaded with AMD technology is that it supports the rate racing function. This technology is characterized by realizing light reflected from objects in videos and games close to reality. Many experts call it Samsung Electronics’ powerful weapon to gain an advantage in device performance in the growing mobile game market. It also drastically reduced battery consumption, which holds the key to game execution.
Samsung Electronics also promoted the excellence of rate racing applied for the first time in the world in mobile APs when it launched the Exynos 2200 in January. However, it is highly likely that Korean consumers will not experience this technology because the Exynos does not go into the Galaxy S22 to be released in Korea. U.S. consumers, one of the biggest markets for mobile games, are not expected to be able to use the race rating function like those in Korea.
However, considering that there has been some negative public opinion about Exynos among Korean consumers and that there are currently few mobile games that support the rate racing function, some experts say that it may be more reasonable to load the Snapdragon into the Galaxy S22 to be sold in Korea.