More AMD Radeon GPUs Coming to Samsung Exynos Smartphone Chips

The first attempt to bring AMD’s Radeon graphics to Samsung’s Exynos chips may have underwhelmed, but don’t expect the companies to give up. 

On Thursday, Samsung announced(Opens in a new window) it had struck a multi-year agreement with AMD “to bring multiple generations of high-performance, ultra-low-power AMD Radeon graphics solutions” to a larger portfolio of Exynos chips. The goal is to bring both “console-level” graphics and optimized power consumption to Samsung mobile devices.

The agreement arrives after the two companies began partnering on the graphics integration back in 2019. The result was the Exynos 2200, which launched last year with a dedicated GPU called Xclipse that’s built off AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture—the same technology powering the graphics on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.  

Samsung tried to hype up the Exynos 2200 as a cutting-edge smartphone chip featuring ray tracing, which can bring realistic lighting and shadow effects to supported games. However, reviews have shown the chip often underperforming(Opens in a new window) against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip in gaming and other benchmarks(Opens in a new window). 

Samsung has been developing the Exynos line for years, but the chips have mainly been packed in Galaxy smartphones sold in select markets outside the US. For phones in North America, Samsung has instead tapped Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line. In addition, this year’s Galaxy S23 phones are only offered with Snapdragon chips, with no option for an Exynos processor. 

Hence, it remains unclear which devices will carry the future Radeon-Exynos chips. But Samsung said it remains focusing on bringing innovation to the mobile space by tapping AMD’s GPU technology. In the meantime, rumors(Opens in a new window) have emerged that Samsung is preparing a new Exynos 2300 processor, which will also feature an RDNA2 CPU.