Samsung Teases AMD RDNA2-Powered Exynos Chip, Announcement January 11

Through its official Twitter account, Samsung published a short, 7-second video that serves as an appetizer for the main course: The marriage of Samsung's Exynos Arm SoC IP with AMD's graphics expertise in RDNA2 is finally coming to fruition. According to Samsung, playtime (for its rivals, it seems?) will be over come January 11th.

The seven-second teaser seems to be set in a sci-fi landscape (the alien kind of gives that away). It's currently unclear how the teaser was rendered; it certainly seems plausible that Samsung could have created the short solely with the power of its upcoming Exynos 2200 series with AMD's RDNA2 graphics. That would certainly be a bold marketing move from the company, and it should be feasible: the SoC development appears to be in the final stages. The quality of the video stream leaves much to be desired, however, and a mixture of both live-action and rendering - or even just live-action - could be in the cards here.

The collaboration between AMD and Samsung was first announced back in August 2019. At the time, AMD penned the deal that would see its Radeon graphics IP being integrated with Samsung's Arm SoC design, and solutions with AMD Radeon and Samsung's Exynos were slated for release within a two-year timeframe.

The idea is to leverage AMD's storied history in graphics to bring performant GPU capabilities to mobile that can fight off Apple's Bionic SoCs and the industry-leading Adreno GPUs employed by Qualcomm on its Snapdragon series. Samsung has been historically trailing both its competitors in overall performance for years now - and perhaps RDNA2 will bring about a change in the narrative.

That's certainly Samsung and AMD's intention; but of course, in a highly competitive market, leadership performance is a moving target. While some benchmark leaks have shown Samsung's Exynos 2200 destroy Apple's Bionic A14 SoC back in January of this year - in GPU workloads. However, don't expect desktop or laptop-class performance from the Radeon graphics; these are being deployed in a low-power environment. There's only so much six RDNA2 Compute Units featuring 384 Streaming Processors can accomplish in that constrained power envelope - but they could and should bring about raytracing capabilities to the Samsung mobile sphere.

More recent CPU-bound leaks have painted a different picture, with Apple's chip outperforming the Exynos cores in Samsung's chip by a respectable margin in both single-core and multi-core tests. However, we do have to keep in mind that these leaked benchmarks were obtained from unfinished silicon and unfinished software stacks. However, we could see an even more impressive GPU performance display - and a more competitive CPU performance from Samsung.

We guess we'll have to wait for January 11th, 2022, to see the fruits of this Exynos and Radeon brainchild. In the meantime, Samsung is clearly attempting to come out of the gates swinging. Playtime may indeed be over for the company's SoC offerings compared to the competition, but will this bring about new playtime opportunities for customers? That's the question we have in our minds.