Samsung was initially scheduled to announce the Exynos 2200 on January 11th, but that date came and went by with no word from the company. Instead, it removed all traces of the teaser from its social media channels, sparking rumors that the chip had been canceled altogether. The company was quick to dismiss such reports and confirmed that it will indeed launch its next flagship Exynos chip in due course. A week later, Samsung has announced its next-gen chipset and detailed some of its key improvements.

The Exynos 2200 packs octa-core Arm v9 CPUs in a tri-cluster arrangement, consisting of a performance-oriented Cortex X2 core, three balanced Cortex-A710 cores, and four power-efficient Cortex-A510 cores. The core count and setup are similar to MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 — the other two high-end chips that will find their way inside select Android flagships this year. The nitty-gritty details like the clock speed and cache have not been revealed yet.

Built on Samsung foundry's 4nm EUV process, the highlight of the next-gen Exynos chip is the AMD RDNA 2-based Xclipse 920 GPU, which brings features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading to offer "console quality" visuals on mobile devices. The former allows the GPU to simulate how light behaves physically in the real world, while the latter improves performance by enabling developers to lower the shading rate in non-visible areas without affecting the overall graphical quality. The GPU can also drive QHD+ displays at a 144Hz refresh rate.

For improved AI and ML performance, the Exynos 2200 features a dual-core NPU that's twice as fast as its predecessor. Additionally, it supports high-precision FP16 and power-efficient INT8, INT16 calculations. The redesigned ISP can drive camera sensors of up to 200MP or dual camera setups consisting of 64MP and 36MP shooters. It can also simultaneously power up to four cameras and record videos in up to 4K HDR, 4K at 120fps, or 8K at 30fps resolution. There's also a native AV1 decoder for power-efficient playback of videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other compatible streaming services.

The new built-in 5G modem supports more mmWave and sub-6GHz bands than before, with a maximum theoretical download speed of 10Gbps in dual connectivity (EN-DC) mode. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and NFC. There's a dedicated Secure Element for enhanced security to store cryptographic keys, too.

The Exynos 2200 is currently in mass production, which means it should make its way inside at least some international variants of the Galaxy S22 series that's seemingly coming next month.