For years, Apple's A-series chips have been the most powerful in smartphones, beating out the best silicon from Qualcomm and other manufacturers with relative ease. But that is about to change. [That's because early benchmarks of Samsung's Exynos 2200 chip, which will be used in the Galaxy S22 next year, beat Apple's A14 Bionic system-on-chip (SoC) in the iPhone 12. The results look so good that Apple may not be able to close the gap with the upcoming iPhone 13.

And this is quite exciting since the Exynos 2200 is expected to feature a graphics processor built on AMD's latest RDNA 2 technology.

First, let's take a look at the alleged benchmarks, supposedly revealed by leaker @FrontTron on Twitter: in GFXBench's Manhattan 3.1 benchmark, the "June sample" of the Exynos 2200 screams 170.7 frames per second! In contrast, the A14 Bionic achieved a respectable 120 fps; in both Aztec's Normal and High benchmarks, the Samsung chip achieved 121.4 fps and 51.5 fps, respectively, while the A14 Bionic recorded 79.7 fps and 30 fps.

In other words, the Exynos 2200 seems to blow Apple's chip out of the water. The flagship Exynos chips have never been slow, but they have also not always been able to keep up with the A-series and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8-series SoCs. But that seems to be changing, at least in terms of graphics.

I find this quite exciting. Not that there is a lack of graphics power on smartphones, but unless you are streaming on Xbox Cloud Gaming, the console-grade gaming experience (we are talking about Xbox One and PS4 era games here, not the new generation of games I still don't think it will offer us the best of both worlds. But the Galaxy S22 and Exynos 2200, with GPUs derived from proper PC and console gaming technology, could change that.

As previously detailed, with extra power and some clever software engineering, the next flagship Samsung phone could be able to run some of the best Xbox One games natively, rather than via streaming . Add in save syncing, etc., and you would effectively have a portable Xbox or Xbox Phone. This may be wishful thinking on my part, but since Samsung has worked closely with Microsoft on a variety of devices, the Galaxy S22 could see the two companies join forces on the Xbox and gaming side.

That said, the iPhone 13 series is said to be powered by the next generation A-series chip, possibly the A15 Bionic. And we expect this chip to be powerful as well, if the various leaks and this benchmark result are legitimate. But at the very least, Apple should have its work cut out to compete with the Exynos 2200.

In any case, the next six months or so will be quite interesting for smartphone graphics. Our review of Samsung's Galaxy S21 impressed us with the Korean company's flagship model, and our excitement for the Galaxy S22 is definitely building.