When it comes to mobile phone processors, your first impression is Apple's A-series processor, Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor, MediaTek's Tianji series or Huawei's Kirin? It is true that these four series almost represent processor suppliers that include the entire mobile phone market, but there is actually one processor that also needs our attention, that is, Samsung's self-developed Exynos processor.
When it comes to Samsung's Exynos processor, some readers may have some impressions of it, after all, Meizu was a loyal user of Samsung processors, and classic MX3, MX4 and other products are equipped with Exynos processors. However, with the rise of Qualcomm Snapdragon, Apple A Series and Kirin, Exynos' advantages are getting smaller and smaller, Meizu has also chosen to join the arms of MediaTek and Qualcomm, and consumers' attention to it is naturally getting lower and lower.
On January 18, a new generation of Exynos processors was officially released, but what made Xiao Lei more confused was that there was not much information about the Exynos 2200 on the Internet. Even if the relevant information is found, the number of comments is very small, which shows the degree of consumer concern about it. Why did the former Android light fall to this point, in the era of high brothers and brothers going hand in hand, Samsung Exynos really has a head day?
Is it the Light of Android or the Bladder of Android?
First of all, Xiao Lei briefly introduced the detailed parameters of this Exynos 2200:
Process: Samsung 4nm process;
CPU: 1+3+4 combo, cortex X2 (2.80GHz) with super core, Cortex A710 (2.52GHz) with large core, cortex A510 (1.82GHz) with small core;
GPU: Xclipse 920 GPU based on AMD RDNA 2 architecture;
NPU: Integrated 3GPP Release 16 5G modem, peak 10Gbps and supports LNDDR5 and UFS 3.1, 4K 120Hz/QHD+ 144Hz screen.
ISP: Up to 200 million pixels, 30fps is the CASE ISP supports up to 108MP in single camera mode, dual camera mode supports 64Mp+36Mp, up to 7 cameras, 4 cameras run at the same time. Support 4K 240fps, 8K 60fps decoding, 4K 120fps, 8K 30fps encoding.
Probably most readers have a hard time understanding such a large string of parameters, in order to let everyone better understand the performance of Exynos 2200, Xiao Lei took out the same 2022 flagship processor Snapdragon 8Gen 1 and Tianji 9000 as a comparison.
In terms of hardware configuration, the overall configuration of the Exynos 2200 is not much different from the two, the only big difference is that the former uses the Xclipse 920 GPU, which is jointly developed with AMD, with high-end features such as ray tracing and variable rate shaders, which is also one of the advantages of the Exynos 2200. In addition, the CPU has been fully reduced, and the specific reasons will be introduced later.
But we all know that just looking at the hardware parameters is no reference, according to the GeekBench5 running score data shared by @Digital Chat Station, the Exynos 2200 has almost no improvement compared with the previous generation Exynos 2100.
In contrast, the super core frequency of the previous generation Snapdragon 888 processor is 2.84GHz, the Snapdragon 8Gen1 super core frequency is 3.0GHz, and the Tianji 9000 super core frequency is 3.05GHz, which is slightly higher than the Exynos2200 specification.
Although the large core frequency does not represent the performance of the entire processor, this performance that is significantly lower than the industry level is really difficult to make people expect it, Xiao Lei guessed that it is because the total power consumption of the processor is too high, and it can only be improved by reducing the frequency at the expense of performance.
In addition to the CPU, the performance of the GPU is more stretched, and the test data is far lower than the Xiaomi Mi 12 equipped with Snapdragon 8Gen1, and even slightly inferior to the previous generation of Snapdragon 888 processors, almost completely overturned. This is still based on the snapdragon 8Gen 1 compared to last year's little improvement.
What is more embarrassing is that according to the actual test data of the extranet, the power consumption of exynos 2200 in the test link has reached 10W, if it is in the game link, the heat of the mobile phone is unimaginable.
Seeing that some readers here may want to say," all this crotch, what is the need for Samsung to continue research and development?" "But in fact, Samsung Exynos processors also had a brilliant period, the most classic is the Exynos 7420 and Exynos 8890, these two generations of processors with the strongest CPU performance and good GPU performance became the most bucket of SoC on the market at that time." At that time, its opponents Qualcomm and Kirin were surpassed by Exynos one by one because of defects such as power consumption or weak GPU performance.
It may be that Samsung realizes that manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Kirin have great potential and are likely to surpass themselves in the future, so Samsung has worked hard to develop its own "mongoose" architecture and achieved stage results, and the Exynos 8890 mentioned above is a strong player. However, since the Exynos 8890, Samsung's self-developed processor has begun to slowly decline, and the culprit is naturally the "mongoose". With the development of the ARM architecture and technical iteration, the energy consumption ratio of Samsung's self-developed "mongoose" architecture has always lagged behind the ARM public architecture.
To put it simply, the design of the "Mongoose" large core + public version of the small core failed to open a substantial gap between Samsung and Qualcomm and Huawei HiSilicon products of the same level, but made its own processor performance once again hanged. At the same time, compared with the same level of ARM public architecture, Samsung's mongoose chip is also far behind in power consumption.
The results of the back, I believe everyone also knows, and later the performance of the Samsung processor using the self-developed "mongoose" core can only be described as "general". Samsung's expensive self-developed structure has not brought additional benefits to Samsung, and the global market share of Samsung mobile phones has declined.
On December 31, 2019, Samsung announced the dissolution of its Austin-based Mongoose Architecture team, officially announcing the failure of the Mongoose Architecture that has invested $17 billion. However, abandoning the meerkat self-developed architecture does not mean that the Exynos processor has ushered in the end, but returned to the embrace of arm public architecture.
Samsung itself can't look at the processor, can there be a next generation?
In the eyes of the outside world, Samsung's timely abandonment of the mongoose architecture is a good thing, but the problem is that the days of Exynos after returning to the ARM architecture are still not good, perhaps the technical gap or perhaps the progress speed of Qualcomm Kirin is too fast, resulting in the subsequent exynos processor using arm architecture is still the fat player who "runs invincible and pulls the crotch in actual combat".
This kind of superficially powerful processor is naturally impossible to be welcomed in the highly competitive Chinese market, so we have seen the wonderful operation of Samsung: the Samsung mobile phone of the National Bank of China is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and the European version of the Korean version of Samsung is equipped with an Exynos processor.
But this is quite unfair to foreign consumers, who do not want to spend the same price to buy a mobile phone with a worse overall experience. Therefore, in 2020, some foreign netizens launched a petition on the change.org (online social welfare petition platform): hoping that Samsung would deactivate the Exynos processor. The initiators believe that the exynos processor-equipped mobile phone not only has worse performance and higher power consumption than the mobile phone equipped with the Snapdragon processor, but also the camera performance is not satisfactory.
Although the follow-up Samsung official said in the forum that the Exynos 990 is almost the same as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, the actual performance in the end is up to the consumer.
Xiao Lei believes that an important reason why Samsung's Exynos processor has been in a downturn is that not many mobile phone manufacturers are willing to use Exynos at present. Generally speaking, every year, the Exynos flagship, Samsung will be carried on the Korean and European versions of the mobile phone, and other regions are used in the Snapdragon version. This has led to less shipments of exynos versions of mobile phones, and there is no way to optimize and design through different models like Qualcomm, HiSilicon, and MediaTek, and eventually it will only fall into a vicious circle.
However, Samsung has tried to cooperate and customize with other mobile phone manufacturers since the beginning of 19 years, and the current close cooperation with Samsung in this regard is vivo, vivo's X30 series is equipped with Exynos 980, X60 series equipped with Exynos 1080. This may allow exynos chips to be used on more mobile phones in the future, which is a good start.
Of course, the above conjectures are all based on a good direction, but according to the Weibo of @Digital Chat Station, Vivo has given up the Exynos processor this year and replaced it with MediaTek's Tianji series. Coupled with last year's Korean version of the Samsung Galaxy S21 series is no longer equipped with Exynos processors, So Xiao Lei speculated that the "back pot" is still European consumers.
From a consumer perspective, they certainly don't want to see exynos processor iterations again, and no one wants to pay the same price for a phone with a worse experience. But for Samsung itself, the reason why they are willing to invest a lot of money every year to support this "Adou" is actually very similar to Apple: it is to save costs and seek more profits.
As the world's largest supplier of mobile phone screens and mobile phone sensors, Samsung will definitely not be satisfied with this, after all, it still has a complete production line in its hands, and the production cost is much lower than qualcomm Apple and the like. Once Samsung's Exynos processor can catch up with Qualcomm's footsteps, perhaps the monopoly of the mobile phone chip market will also be broken by Samsung.
Looking back at the history of Samsung Exynos, it is not difficult to find that in the early years, Exynos SoCs actually had products with performance and design that far exceeded those of other competitors. For example, the Exynos7420 used in the Galaxy S6 series won the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 with its super energy efficiency ratio at that time. Later, based on Samsung's self-developed "mongoose" big core architecture, Exynos8895, Exynos9825 and other products did have a very good reputation among some Samsung users, and even once because it was far superior to competitors in the same period and could almost match the nuclear single-core performance of Apple's A-series chips at that time, it was called "Android Light". But today's Samsung has become tied hands, not thinking about how to surpass the opponent, but in terms of data to fully close, why not let go of the hands and feet to try it?
As far as the current data is concerned, the Samsung Exynos 2200 is another generation of overturning, the CPU is standing still, and although the GPU is significantly improved compared to the previous generation, the overall performance is still crotch-pulling. As for why this is so, or Samsung's 4nm process is not powerful, after the frequency goes up, the energy consumption cannot be suppressed, and the performance can only be sacrificed in exchange for energy consumption performance. Not surprisingly, this year's Samsung impact on high-end chips is another dream, after all, even they don't want to use the chip, other manufacturers are more unlikely to use, this is also a disguised assist Snapdragon 8, in fact, from the exynos 2200's current performance, Snapdragon 8 Gen1 does not seem to be so unbearable.