In keeping up the pace with archrival Apple Inc’s iPhone in the gaming realm, Samsung has drawn out its first mobile processor powered by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. graphics.

The new Exynos 2200 processor is the industry's first mobile chip with hardware support for ray tracing, an advanced technique to high-fidelity graphics that has been gaining ground in PC graphics cards.

It is developed upon Samsung's most sophisticated 4nm fabrication process. Samsung describes the Xclipse graphics chip, which is based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, as ‘bridging the gap between console and mobile performance’.

The eight-core Exynos 2200 system-on-chip, which is already in mass production, is one of the first to incorporate the latest Armv9 central processor cores and features an inbuilt neural processing unit for AI activities. According to Samsung, the performance of the NPU has doubled this iteration.

The processor, which will be at the heart of Android handsets this year, also includes 5G wireless connectivity.

Samsung claims that the GPU will bring gaming features previously only available on laptops and desktop PCs to mobile devices in an energy-efficient architecture.

The chip also includes an image signal processor (ISP) that can handle cameras with resolutions of up to 200 Megapixels for still images and up to 108 Megapixels for video at 30 frames per second. For multi-camera systems, there is additional support for attaching up to seven image sensors and using up to four at the same time.

If users have the right camera gear, they should be able to record 8K video at 30 frames per second, and the chip can decode 8K video at up to 60 frames per second or 4K video at up to 240 frames per second.

Support for displays with frame rates up to 144 Hz, HDR+ support, and a new neural processing unit are among the other features. a 5G modem that supports sub-6 GHz and mmWave, as well as an Integrated Secure Element (iSE) for storing private cryptographic keys.

In some areas, Samsung is said to have integrated its own Exynos processors in its flagship Galaxy devices, and it has customers such as Vivo that use its silicon in their cellphones.

“Samsung’s Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos,” says David Wang, senior vice president, AMD.