We've known for months that non-US versions of the Samsung Galaxy S22 – and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8 Ultra – would get Samsung's new Exynos 2200 system on a chip. What we didn't know was what that SoC would deliver. Now we do, and we're excited, because it's going to power some of the very best Android phones in 2022.
The Exynos 2200 is the first smartphone chip with an AMD ray tracing GPU, and it shares its RDNA graphics architecture with the graphics in the Xbox Series X and PS5. The short version: it's a beast.
Samsung Exynos 2200: more power, more efficient
The Exynos 2200 is a quad-core design with one high-powered Cortex X2 core, three Cortex A-710 cores and four more efficient Cortex A-510 cores. The neural processing unit is faster than before – Samsung says twice as fast – and it can support camera sensors up to 200MP.
It's the graphics that have many gamers excited. AMD's RDNA architecture delivers hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing for stunning visuals, and while the Exynos doesn't have the power of an Xbox Series X or PS5 this is still a first for mobile devices and a big leap in terms of what mobile processors can deliver.
We can't compare the Exynos 2200 with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 just yet, because Samsung hasn't announced the clock speeds for its cores; we do know that the Snapdragon 8 has a 3.0GHz Cortex X2, three 2.5GHz Cortex A-710s and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A510 cores, and that in benchmarks it delivered comparable performance to the iPhone 13 Pro while leaving some of the best gaming phones in the dust. So no matter where you live, it looks like whichever Samsung Galaxy S22 you get will bring you blistering performance.
