In case anyone had any doubt about what Samsung is planning to infuse in its next-generation Exynos system-on-chip (SoC), the company set the matter straight on Twitter. Partially, anyway—Samsung confirmed its next Exynos chip will feature a custom GPU "born from RDNA 2," which is AMD's latest-generation graphics architecture.
Samsung and AMD
announced a partnership in 2019 to bring the latter's Radeon graphics into the former's mobile silicon. That's obviously an exciting proposition, even more so now Samsung has confirmed it will employ RDNA 2 in its next mobile chip. Likewise, the timing of the confirmation hints that this could end up in the Galaxy S22.
In the tweet, Samsung uses the hashtag #PlatimeisOver, though in reality play time is getting ready to begin, depending on the fruits of this collaboration. Back in June, Samsung's Dr. Inyup Kango stated that the company's "next flagship product" would
employ AMD's next-gen mobile GPU, and so the Galaxy S22 seems like an obvious candidate.
Based on past leaks, we're looking at a Exynos 2200 chip with RDNA 2 graphics. It's already shown up in the
benchmark circuit, though all we could see was compute performance rather than graphics. To that end, though, the Exynos 2200 at least looked competitive.
It will be interesting to see how Samsung chooses to make its Exynos 2200 with RDNA 2 available. In past launches, Samsung has used its own Exynos hardware in international versions of its smartphones and Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs in the US.
We should find out soon enough—Samsung's tweet indicates an announcement is coming on January 11, 2022.