Samsung’s Exynos 2200 mobile chip will sport AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics

The “multi-year strategic partnership” between Samsung and AMD, announced back in 2019, is finally starting to take shape. The South Korean smartphone maker has started teasing the next version of its flagship smartphone chipset — the Exynos 2200 — which will have graphics based on AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture. This is the same tech that runs on graphics chips powering Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X gaming consoles.

The announcement is yet another sign of ARM’s growing dominance over traditional PC architecture. Processors built on British chip design firm ARM’s architectures have quickly become a mainstay in computing, powering everything from smartphones to supercomputers. AMD’s graphics tech, on the other hand, has traditionally been built for x86 architecture, which is fundamentally different from ARM’s designs.

ARM’s designs have traditionally been meant for mobile devices, where efficiency and power consumption are chief concerns. The x86 design, on the other hand, was designed by Intel and is meant to power processors running on laptops etc. where performance is prioritized. With the collaboration with Samsung, AMD is essentially accommodating its traditional design architecture to ARM devices.

To be sure, Samsung usually doesn’t offer its Exynos chips to other companies. However, the company’s flagship chips run on millions of its own devices, including the Galaxy S flagship. It succeeds the Exynos 2100, which runs on the Galaxy S21 series of devices right now.

The company is also claiming that AMD’s introduction will make its system-on-chip well suited for gamers. “#PlaytimeIsOver. The gaming marketplace is about to get serious. Stay tuned for the next #Exynos with the new GPU born from RDNA 2. January 11, 2022,” the company said in a tweet.

Samsung isn’t the only company trying to marry PC and mobile processing either. Competitor Apple has done the opposite, replacing Intel chips on its Mac computers with new ARM-based chips. While Apple has its own custom designs, the ARM chips allow the company to run both PC and mobile apps on the same device. Microsoft and Qualcomm, too, have worked together to bring the latter’s Snapdragon chips to PCs.