Samsung Exynos 2800 Locks in Full-Path Tracing: Going Head-to-Head with Apple M7

The core parameters of Samsung’s next-generation flagship SoC Exynos 2800 have recently been revealed. Samsung plans to completely skip traditional ray tracing on the Exynos 2800’s Xclipse 980 GPU and directly switch to pure path tracing technology.

In terms of rendering technology, path tracing differs fundamentally from the hybrid ray tracing commonly used on current mobile devices. Ray tracing takes shortcuts to reduce rendering load, while path tracing follows the physical laws of real light and shadow, involves a huge amount of tracking, and has higher requirements for hardware computing power.

The task was undertaken by the Xclipse 980 GPU, which is also Samsung’s first mobile graphics processor with a completely self-developed architecture, ending its reliance on AMD’s RDNA architecture since 2022.

The CPU specifications have also seen a significant leap forward, adopting a 10-core tri-cluster architecture with two 4.5GHz super-large cores, four 3.8GHz performance cores, and four 2.0GHz energy-efficient cores. It is equipped with up to 96MB of system-level SLC cache and an ultra-wide bus interface to minimize data latency between the CPU and GPU.

Samsung has prepared two solutions for this project. In addition to the mobile version for the Galaxy S28 flagship phone, there is also a separate Chromebook version, directly targeting Apple’s entry-level M7 chip.

This marks the first time Samsung has extended a single mobile SoC architecture to the laptop market, essentially mirroring Apple’s strategy of sharing chips from iPhone to Mac.

In terms of mass production timeline, Samsung aims to complete tape-out by the end of 2026 and officially release the Galaxy S28 series in 2028.