Samsung no-showed on its major Exynos 2200 launch and won’t say why

So here’s a crazy story. Samsung was supposed to have a big SoC launch today, but that launch did not happen. Samsung didn’t cancel or delay the event. The January 11 date was announced, and we even wrote about it, but when the time for the event came, nothing happened! Samsung pulled a no-call no-show for a major product launch. It’s the end of the day now, and the company has yet to respond to what must be hundreds of press inquiries—including ours!—that are no doubt flooding its email inbox. Samsung stood-up the entire tech industry, and now it won’t say why. Nobody knows what is going on.

The Exynos 2200 was (?) shaping up to be a major launch for Samsung. It is, after all, the first Samsung SoC with the headline-grabbing feature of having an AMD GPU. The two companies announced this deal a year ago, and we’ve been giddy about it ever since. The Exynos 2200 is (or was) going to debut in the Galaxy S22. That launch event is currently scheduled for February 8, assuming Samsung doesn’t ghost everyone again.

Samsung announced the Exynos 2200 event just 12 days ago, saying, “Stay tuned for the next Exynos with the new GPU born from RDNA 2. January 11, 2022.” (RDNA 2 is an AMD GPU architecture). In addition to a tweet from the official verified @SamsungExynos account, the company also cut a promo video ending with the January 11, 2022, date. You can still watch it at archive.org. The closest thing Samsung has done to communicate about the status of the Exynos 2200 is to delete its tweets promoting the show.

With no official word on what is going on, we can only turn to the rumor mill for answers, which is currently on fire. You should take this next bit with a grain of salt, but on January 10—before it was clear there would be no Exynos event—plugged-in Samsung leaker Ice Universe tweeted that “Samsung postponed the release of Exynos2200.” Another leaker, Dohyun Kim, claims Exynos 2200 will be removed from the Galaxy S22 lineup entirely. Rather than the usual split of Exynos for some regions and a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip for other regions, every Galaxy S22 would use a Snapdragon chip. How Samsung could ever do this a month before launch is unclear, but we’ll have to see what the actual S22 ship date is.

Samsung postponed the release of Exynos2200. Since last year, the release of Samsung exynos has not been smooth. In fact, the Exynos 1200 was originally planned in November, but it was cancelled halfway. It seems that many things happen inside Samsung LSI, but not a good thing.

— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) January 11, 2022

Samsung’s Exynos division has struggled for years, and the AMD deal was supposed to be its big comeback. An exciting, powerful GPU with desktop Radeon branding would have turned heads. Samsung’s marketing team was already pushing the gaming angle, though, and this would be an awkward marketing job since not every region would have gotten the Exynos chip.

With everything that’s going on in the world, announcing a delay would have been No Big Deal. But I have never seen a major tech company just not show up to its own event. Instead of a comeback, this is a new low for the Exynos division. We’ll update this article if Samsung ever gets its act together and makes a statement. We’re all waiting.