Updated December 17: article originally posted December 16.
As the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S24 family draws closer, more attention is being paid to Samsung’s decisions around the heart of the new flagship smartphone.
Following the decision to use a mix of Samsung’s Exynos and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon system-on-chipthe community has been hoping for Samsung to deliver an increase in the performance of its chipset.
Update: Sunday December 10. With 2024’s smartphones all rolling out AI-based features, strong specifications will be needed to offer fast and smooth experiences for AI software running locally. That also means the software must be in the best condition possible.
Samsung will rely on its recently announced Samsung Gauss AI software for these experiences, which are expected to include photo editing tools, generative wallpaper, text creation, and real-time translation. All this and more needs training data, and this weekend’s announcement of a partnership with the Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences is an important addition to the data sets.
The partnership offers Samsung 20,000 academic papers to train the generative model in Gauss. That might not help out with photo editing, but it will undoubtedly contribute to the large language model that will support text content being created and summarized on a user’s device.
The better the hardware, the better the results. The comparison between the Exynos and Snapdragon chips will be critical as Samsung looks to create a single unified AI experience.
New details on the Exynos 2400 chip from reliable tipster Tech_Reve show Samsung has leapt forward in performance, but it is still expected to fall short of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 For Samsung chipset. The latter will power every Galaxy S24 Ultra model but only a select number of Galaxy S24 and S24+ models, depending on which territory you buy your new Galaxy S smartphone.
The biggest news comes with the GPU. Samsung has been working with AMD, and the new Exynos capabilities are set to exceed that of the equivalent A17 Pro chipset found in the recently released iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max.
Compared to the previous version, the latest Exynos is a thinner package with increased levels of heat dissipation. The latter should allow for more sustained performance.
One of the biggest benefits to the Exynos 2400 over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the simplest… it’s cheaper.
Last week’s leaked prices suggest that Samsung will carry over the Galaxy S23, S23+ and S23 Ultra prices to the Galaxy S24 family. Given the increased pricing of several key parts (especially the cost of memory and storage), the move back to sharing Exynos and Snapdragon across the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ models will help keep the bill of materials as low as possible.
The Galaxy S24 family, including the S24 Ultra and S-Pen, will launch in early 2024 at a “Galaxy Unpacked” event that is widely expected to take place on January 17th.