TL;DR
- Samsung’s latest Galaxy phone has a custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip.
- The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy may essentially be what this year’s Plus variant would have been.
- Users likely won’t see much of a performance boost.
Samsung officially revealed the Galaxy S23 series during Galaxy Unpacked today. Along with a bevy of other features, the device is getting a custom Qualcomm chip called the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy. Although we’ve heard through numerous leaks that it’s an overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, we didn’t know how it differed from the normal version. That is until now.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus
Large AMOLED display
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 power
Bigger battery
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
New 200MP main camera
Beautiful display
S Pen functionality
According to folks over there at XDA Developers, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy increases the primary clock speed by .16GHz and the GPU clock speed by 39MHz. As such, it’s assumed that this custom chip may in fact be what would have been the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 2.
However, minor improvements aren’t the only difference between the two variants. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy ship has a few other changes. One of which will allow the Galaxy S23 series to be the first smartphone to use Snapdragon’s Cognitive ISP.
This Cognitive ISP feature enables real-time Semantic Segmentation that’s capable of enhancing images. It works by using a deep learning model that identifies objects in an image to understand what’s happening in it. This may aid in the processing process.
The Plus variant of its chips tends to be reserved for Qualcomm’s mid-gen refresh. Could the existence of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy mean that Qualcomm is planning to skip the Plus variant this year? We’ll have to wait and see what Qualcomm decides to do. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if the chip maker still made a Plus variant, but made it slightly better than Samsung’s chip.
