Samsung Exynos chips with RDNA 2 graphics are set for release later this year

Forward-looking: AMD and Samsung announced a partnership to develop low power graphics technologies in 2019. Since then, no product has seen the light from this collaboration, but according to AMD’s Lisa Su keynote during this year’s Computex, that will change this year as Samsung plans to launch an Exynos chip powered by RDNA 2 graphics.

“The next place you’ll find RDNA 2 will be the high-performance mobile phone market,” said AMD’s CEO Lisa Su during the company’s keynote at Computex 2021. “AMD has partnered with industry leader Samsung for several years to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market, and we’re happy to announce that we’ll bring custom graphics IP to Samsung’s next flagship mobile SoC with ray tracing and variable rate shading capabilities. We’re really looking forward to Samsung providing more details later this year.”

The upcoming Exynos chip with RDNA 2 graphics will most likely succeed the flagship Exynos 2100 SoC. If Samsung releases it later this year, we can expect to see the first devices using it in late 2021 or the first half of 2022.

Samsung and AMD haven’t detailed the specifications and technologies built into the RDNA 2 GPU, but it’s expected that the chip will support ray tracing and variable rate shading (VRS).

It’s also unclear what devices will be powered by the new Exynos chip. Rumors claim that it may come in an Exynos-powered laptop featuring Radeon graphics as soon as this year.

Official performance figures have not been shared yet either, but a Twitter user already posted some benchmark results of the GPU component of the upcoming chip. When compared to the Adreno 650 found on the Snapdragon 865/865+/870 SoCs, the RDNA GPU offered more than twice the graphics performance.