The next Samsung flagship phone could come with some impressive graphical capabilities not unlike what’s in a console.
There’s a new chip coming in the mobile world, and we have a pretty good idea where it’s going, as Samsung announces its next Exynos chip, the Exynos 2200.
Chip updates for phones aren’t often big news, but with Samsung often announcing them either at the end of the year or just at the beginning, there’s often an obvious place where they plan to be: the new Samsung flagship for the year, at least in Australia and parts of the world that aren’t America.
Last year in January, it was the Exynos 2100, possibly named for 2021, and subsequently thrown into the Samsung S21 and S21 Ultra, while this year, it’s the Exynos 2200, expected in a soon-to-be-announced S22.
For the new chip, Samsung has a combination of CPUs to make it an eight-core chip, plus support for twice the AI and machine learning performance of its predecessor, a security element, and support for both 5G technologies, sub-6 and mmWave, telling you that it won’t just be the Pixel 6 Pro that supports two 5G technology very shortly.
There are also improvements to the image processing capabilities, supporting up to 200 megapixels if a phone has a 200 megapixel sensor (yikes!), plus support for 4K or 8K video capture, and the ability to drive up to seven cameras or four simultaneously.
That alone doesn’t tell you how many cameras the S22 will have, but we do have an idea of what may end up being a majorly talked up feature: gaming.
You see, Samsung’s Exynos 2200 uses a graphics chip powered by AMD’s RDNA 2, the architecture used in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
Called the “Xclipse” graphics processing unit, it’s unlikely to offer quite the same performance from the next-gen video game consoles inside of a phone because it won’t be quite the same chip or set of chips, but rather something wedged between both. However, it could well provide the sort of graphical improvements game consoles deliver, such as ray tracing and optimised shading, providing better looking and better performing graphics in games on a phone.
All of this will be coming to a phone it seems, and with mobile gaming on the increase, it could mean the S22 isn’t just pitched as the big flagship, but a flagship gamers can look to beyond other gaming-focused mobiles, such as the phones from Razer or the Asus ROG phones.
We should know soon, though, with the Samsung S22 range expected to be announced in February, likely with this chip in our part of the world.
