Samsung will likely use a high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon chip— likely the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (SM-8550)— to power all its Galaxy S23 series phones, as per a noted analyst. The brand is generally known to use a combination of Qualcomm and its own Exynos chips inside its flagship Galaxy S phones. The Galaxy S22 series, for instance, uses both Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Exynos 2200 in different markets. That may not be the case going forward, at least in the next generation.
According to Ming-Chi Kuo, Samsung may go with Qualcomm as sole chip provider for the Galaxy S23 series. This is apparently because its own under-the-works Exynos 2300 chip “can’t compete with SM8550 in all aspects.” Samsung’s Exynos 2200 chip with the much-hyped AMD ray tracing GPU seemingly did not set the smartphone stage on fire and basis of this new revelation, it seems the Exynos 2300 won’t, either. Should Samsung opt for Qualcomm chip in all Galaxy S23 series models, it would be a break with convention for the brand.
The current gen Exynos 2200 is the first mobile processor with a GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 2, the same architecture that lies at the heart of consoles like the PlayStation 5. The GPU, inside the Exynos 2200 that Samsung calls “Xclipse”, supports ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS) “previously only available on PCs, laptops and consoles,” Samsung says. It’s the first of “multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs,” it has confirmed but if Kuo’s prediction is anything to go by, there may be some truth to speculations that despite all the right ingredients, Samsung may not have been able to derive the optimum performance from the Exynos 2200 (which has since seen sporadic availability with Samsung going for Qualcomm chip in markets like India, for the first time) and, also perhaps, with the Exynos 2300.
The analyst says that the “SM8550 is optimised for TSMC’s design rule, so it has obvious advantages over SM8450/SM8475 in computing power and power efficiency” adding that it would “ gain more market share in the high-end Android market in 2023.”
