Samsung announced the launch of the first smartphone chip equipped with AMD ray-traced GPUs

Samsung announced the Exynos 2200, its new internal mobile processor for smartphones. It was the first to include a graphical architecture using AMD RDNA 2

The GPU's mobile system-on-chip enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing and other functions.

The partnership with AMD has a long history. The two companies first announced a licensing agreement in 2019, and then AMD confirmed last year that Samsung's "next-generation flagship mobile SoC" would use RDNA 2. Samsung recently teased the launch of the Exynos 2200, which was originally scheduled for Jan. 11 but mysteriously postponed.

The Exynos 2200 is manufactured using Samsung's 4nm EUV process. Samsung refers to the GPU as the "Xclipse," and David Wang, AMD's senior vice president of Radeon GPU technology, said in a statement that it was "the first result of a planned multi-generation AMD RDNA graphics card in the Exynos SoC."

On the CPU side, the Exynoss 2200 uses the Armv9 core: a high-performance Cortex-X2 "flagship core," three Cortex-A710 cores for balanced performance, and four more efficient Cortex-A510 cores. There's also an upgraded NPU, which Samsung says offers twice the performance of its predecessor, and the ISP architecture designed to support camera sensors of up to 200 million pixels, one of which Samsung announced last year.

Samsung's highest-end Exynos chips typically make their way into the company's flagship Galaxy S phone lineup, though models sold in the U.S. and certain other markets use Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs. Other phone makers like Vivo occasionally use Exynos chips in their own devices, but we may have to wait until the hypothetical Galaxy S22 is in our hands to see if AMD's technology translates into a meaningful leap in mobile GPU performance.