One of the strangest news this week was Samsung’s failure to show up for its own Exynos event. The Korean company was actually expected to announce its new flagship SoC, but it was canceled shortly beforehand. Is that something the NextPit community disturbs? Let’s find out!
In late 2021, Samsung LSI — the Korean chaebol subsidiary responsible for developing processors — announced an announcement for January 11 with the hashtag #playtimeisover. Samsung drummed for the event via Twitter, on a hot site and via video on YouTube.
January 11 came and went with no sign of an announcement. Already on Monday we noticed that all three posts were deleted without warning. But nothing gets lost online, so archived versions can still be found online.
The motto seems a bit inappropriate for a game-oriented component / © Samsung/YouTube
Powered by Radeon
One of the highlights of the new chip would be the new AMD RDNA2 GPU core on a mobile chip. The same GPU architecture that was announced almost three years ago is also used in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox series consoles, of course with a higher core count than one might expect from a mobile SoC.
Rumors of leaked benchmarks suggested that performance was not up to expectations for such a hyped product. Especially after Samsung partially blamed the use of ARM’s Mali GPU in previous Exynos generations.
“The new GPU is expected to fix the problems of the Exynos 2100. We intend to improve our competitiveness by adding gaming GPUs to mobile devices,” a Samsung representative told GSM Arena.
The AMD GPU adoption should give the Exynos SoC a leg up on its Snapdragon competitor, with an as yet unnamed model in the Adreno family. The latter has its origins in the Imageon mobile processors that Qualcomm bought from ATI before the GPU company was in turn bought by AMD. That would be a possible explanation for the fact that Adreno is an anagram for Radeon.
I already shared this on NextPit BR (#rip) but couldn’t avoid reposting the anagram / © AMD (edited by NextPit)
Snapdragon vs Exynos: Hot Chips
While the Exynos lineup has lagged behind in graphics performance over the past few generations, it might seem a bit premature to blame the Mali GPUs. Finally, Huawei’s Kirin 9000 SoC usually beats the Exynos 2100 chip despite using the same Mali-G78 graphics. However, it uses 24 instead of 14 cores and can keep up to some extent with the Snapdragon 888.
With one of the most advanced GPUs on the market, the new Exynos is expected to introduce technologies only found in the PC and console markets, such as: B. Ray tracing. However, the effectiveness is not yet known, since we do not know how the GPU works on a SoC limited by the size of the chip, power consumption and heat dissipation.
In fact, power consumption and heat generation are one of the problems faced by the current generation of mobile processors. For heavy tasks like gaming, performance is throttled to either prevent overheating or to keep battery consumption under control.
And the Exynos range has often been accused of having inferior power and thermal efficiency, huh NextPit when comparing the Samsung S20 FE models with Snapdragon 865 and Exynos 990 SoCs. Even though the distance has narrowed, sites like anandtech notes that the Snapdragon 888 is still slightly ahead of the Exynos 2100.
Graphics performance aside, the hurdle is getting game developers to adapt their games to the capabilities of the new chip. With most companies trying to reach as many players – and devices – as possible in the market, it’s not common to tailor games to flagship devices. Samsung could always fund developers to optimize games for the Exynos chips, just as Nvidia did years ago with some exclusive Android ports for its Shield devices. But is it really a wise investment considering the Galaxy series also uses Snapdragon chips?
The Galaxy S21 FE sold in Europe (SM-G990B) and the US (SM-G990U) features the Snapdragon 888. The markets in Latin America and some Asian countries will receive the model with the Exynos 2100 (SM-G990E) / © Samsung
Is the Exynos really coming to the Galaxy S22?
The last question reflects a sentiment that some of our European readers have already shared in the comments. Samsung traditionally sells its flagships in Europe (as well as Latin America and most of Asia) with a processor that is typically inferior to that found in the North American and Chinese models.
The recent launch of the Galaxy S21 FE with the Snapdragon 888 in the developed world could be a sign that times have changed (or simply a better spread of Qualcomm chips), but it’s too early to say for sure be able.
Nevertheless, it remains exciting for the time being, because it is not known which SoC will be available in which market – and whether the new Exynos will actually be used in the Galaxy S22 series. Although some news sites are reporting that the Exynos 2200 will be announced with the flagship smartphones, Samsung’s response leaves it on NextPit the door open for the processor to come out with any other model:
“Regarding the announcement of the Exynos 2200, we are coordinating the release with the launch of a new smartphone.”
Like it or not, all signs point to a new Exynos chip with AMD RDNA2 graphics coming, but we’ll have to wait for the products to ship to see if the hype was worth the attention.
After all this rambling, I want to ask you one last question for this week.
Thank you for following me to this point. Please forgive me for revisiting things we’ve already covered on NextPit. But there’s a lot that can be said on the subject – so I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments below. And of course I’ll be expecting you all back here on Monday when we analyze the results of the survey.