Andrew Heinzman
Have you ever pulled a no-call no-show? Well, you’re not alone. Samsung was supposed to debut its groundbreaking Exynos 2200 SoC on January 11th, but it bailed on the launch event without telling anyone. What’s worse, the company won’t explain why it skipped work.
Update, 1/18/22: Instead of waiting for its Galaxy S22 launch, Samsung went ahead and announced the Exynos 2200 on January 18th. But it didn’t announce any of the chip’s key details or dismiss claims that the chip has thermal issues.
The Exynos 2200 is arguably Samsung’s most groundbreaking mobile SoC of all time. It’s the company’s first chip with an integrated AMD GPU, which should deliver incredible gaming performance on the Galaxy S22 in some regions (most regions get the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip).
So, as you can imagine, a ton of Samsung fans and tech journalists woke up on January 11th and prepared themselves for the Exynos 2200 launch event. But it never happened. Leakers like Dohyun Kim immediately suggested that the Exynos 2200 is either delayed or canceled.
But Samsung came out of the woodwork on January 12th to say that Exynos 2200 will launch with its next smartphone, presumably the Galaxy S22. It also claimed that there are no problems with the Exynos 2200’s production, but did not explain why it bailed on the Exynos 2200 launch event.
Here’s Samsung’s official comment to Business Korea:
We are planning to unveil the new application processor at the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone. There are no problems with the AP’s production and performance … The new GPU is expected to resolve the problems of the Exynos 2100.
Clearly, something is going on behind the scenes. Large companies like Samsung rarely reschedule launch events, and a no-call no-show is super rare. Also, Samsung scrubbed all of its old announcements for the launch event, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. (Thankfully, the Internet Archive has evidence of these now-deleted announcements.)
Because Samsung won’t explain itself, people are (naturally) turning to leaks and rumors. One such leak, posted to Weibo by Ice Universe, claims that Samsung employees are fighting each other because the Exynos 2200 suffers from thermal issues; it’s supposed to run at 1.9GHz, but it only reaches acceptable temperatures at 1.24GHz.
While this leak seems realistic (especially given the Exynos 2100’s thermal problems), it’s just one of many contradictory explanations for the canceled Exynos 2200 launch. Other leaks pin the blame on AMD or say that the Exynos 2200 is canceled. It seems that we’ll just have to wait for the Galaxy S22 launch to see what Samsung is planning.
Source: Business Korea via Ars Technica
