It sounds more likely that Samsung could skip Exynos for Galaxy S23

Samsung has traditionally stuck to using both Qualcomm Snapdragon and in-house Exynos chipsets in its flagship Galaxy S series. 2022 saw the majority of Galaxy S22 series devices using Snapdragon power though, and it sounds like the company might up the ante next year.

Veteran analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has claimed on Twitter that Qualcomm could be the sole supplier for the Galaxy S23 series next year, adding that it will be manufactured on TSMC’s 4nm process.

“S23 may not adopt Exynos 2300 made by Samsung 4nm because it can’t compete with SM8550 in all aspects,” Kuo noted in a follow-up tweet. The SM8550 is Qualcomm’s next-generation high-end processor, expected to gain the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 moniker.

For what it’s worth, the vanilla Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Samsung’s Exynos 2200 are both manufactured by Samsung. However, our own testing found that these chipsets were a bit of a disappointment due to throttling.

Thankfully, Qualcomm says the refreshed Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 SoC, which is made by TSMC, enjoys major efficiency gains and 10% boosts to CPU and GPU clock speeds. This tentatively suggests that Samsung’s manufacturing process might not be up to par with TSMC’s process. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Samsung purportedly skipping an Exynos release next year. Korea’s Naver outlet made a wild claim back in May, alleging that Samsung would skip Exynos processors for devices in 2023 and 2024 ahead of a new in-house chipset debuting in 2025. Samsung told us at the time that “no specific decision” had been made in this regard.

Still, if this is confirmed, it would mark the first time since 2014’s Galaxy S5 that a Galaxy S flagship series was exclusively powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon silicon. It would also be the first time since 2015’s Galaxy S6 series that one chipset powered a Galaxy S series generation.