Samsung And AMD Create The First Mobile Chip With Ray Tracing Ability

19/01/2022

Thanks to the advancements in technologies, computers can be made faster and more efficient.

By simply decreasing its size, for example, miniaturization allows more components to be packed inside an increasingly smaller dimension. This is in line with the Moore's law, which observes that the number of transistors inside an integrated circuit will double every two years.

And with that in mind, computers will become faster and more powerful, as time passes.

Among others, this fact has helped the huge advancements in mobile technology.

Samsung is the South Korean conglomerate company. And this time, it revealed the Exynos 2200.

Announcing the flagship system-on-chip, the 4-nanometer (nm) EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) Exynos 2200 chip is considered the first-ever mobile chip with ray tracing ability.

Samsung Exynos 2200

On the outside, the Exynos 2200 may look mostly identical to other SOCs.

But inside, it features a tri-cluster octa-core Armv9 cores, consisting of one high-powered Cortex-X2 "flagship core," three Cortex-A710 cores for balanced performance, and four more efficient Cortex-A510 cores

But what makes it unique, is its GPU.

The Exynos 2200 uses a RDNA 2-based GPU that is branded as the Xclipse 920, which offers "ray tracing technology that simulates real-world light movement".

This is made possible because the Exynos 2200 has PC-like graphical features powered by the AMD GPU.

Other features of the Exynos 2200 include an AI engine with dual NPU and DSP, support for a 4K, 120Hz display or QHD+ at 144 Hz, a support for a 200MP camera, [email protected] video recording, LPDDR5 RAM, and UFS 3.1 storage.

Through ray tracing, Samsung is heavily pushing the Exynos 2200's gaming capabilities, going as far as to claim "console quality graphics now on mobile".

In fact, the AMD RDNA 2-based Xclipse 920 GPU is said to be a hybrid GPU positioned between mobile devices and gaming consoles.

Samsung claims that the processor offers faster game loading, smoother frame rates, and swift multitasking.

"The Exynos 2200 will enable the ultimate mobile phone gaming experience, as well as enhancing the overall experience in social media apps and photography," Samsung said in a newsroom post.

In 3D computer graphics, the term ray tracing is to describe a technique for modeling light transport for use in a wide variety of rendering algorithms for generating digital images.

The technology allows the simulation of a variety of optical effects, including reflection, refraction, soft shadows, scattering, depth of field, motion blur, caustics, ambient occlusion and dispersion phenomena, as well as the tracing of the path of sound waves in a similar fashion to light waves, making it a viable option.

As a way to make a more immersive experience, ray tracing can simulate any physical wave or particle phenomenon with approximately linear motion.

The technology does this by using rendering techniques that involve sampling light over a domain generate image noise artifacts that can be addressed by tracing a very large number of rays or using denoising techniques.

Due to how it works, ray tracing deals with complex results and algorithms. And this makes it difficult for the technology to be embedded inside small frame mobile devices.

But with Exynos 2200, Samsung and AMG prove that it is possible.