In line with previous reports, it would seem that Samsung’s Exynos 2200 has gone down the drain. Suffice to say, the SoC with AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics won’t be launching anytime soon, and even if does surface at a later date, it won’t power a flagship device such as the Galaxy S22. We’ll likely see a more budget offering leverage the Exynos 2200 with the core clocks and TDP significantly tapered.
According to the latest info from Ice Universe (a well-reputed source on Samsung products), the Exynos 2200 SoC featuring AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics processor will have an operating clock of 1,300MHz. This is considerably lower than the near-2GHz predicated by early rumors, explaining the lackluster performance of the next-gen Samsung SoC. As reported the other day, the RDNA 2 GPU on the Exynos 2200 even falls short of the Mali GPU on the MediaTek Dimensity 9000. Furthermore, Apple’s A15 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 are yards ahead of the Samsung Exynos 2200. At the same time, Samsung’s official Twitter account has deleted the tweet teasing the announcement on the 11th January launch.
I’m genuinely curious as to whether the GPU failing to meet its pre-determined frequency targets on the Exynos 2200 is the result of Samsung’s node being inferior to TSMC’s 7nm/5nm for which the RDNA architecture was originally optimized.
Previous coverage:
AMD’s mobile RDNA 2 GPU is capable of seriously high clock speeds. At the moment, the engineers are testing two variants of the Exynos 2200 SoC: one with the GPU core clock set to 1.29GHz, and the other to 1.58GHz. The catch is that with the latter, the CPU clocks (of the middle cores) have to be tuned down a bit to keep the TDP in check:
The source claims that the peak GPU score with the 1.58GHz variant is better due to higher retention even after throttling. It looks like the RDNA 2 architecture is capable of high boost clocks regardless of the process node. According to the latest rumor, the mobile RDNA 2 design Samsung is using is capable of a whopping 1.8GHz with the TDP set to 10W.
The scores of the mobile GPU in GFXBench are as follows:
The graphics processor integrated into the mobile SoC in partnership with AMD features 6 CUs, with an operating (boost?) clock of 1.31GHz. The processor was benchmarked (2nd round) in GFXBench, and the following scores were observed:
Manhattan 3.1: 170.7 FPS
Aztec Normal: 121.4 FPS
Aztec High: 51.5 FPS
The GFXBench figures from the 3rd round of the graphic throttling tests are as follows:
Manhattan 3.1: 127.5 FPS
Aztec Normal: 90.7 FPS
Aztec High: 39.65 FPS