2022 was a good year for Samsung fans who prefer Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips on the company’s flagships. The Galaxy S22 series launched with a Snapdragon chip (the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1) in pretty much all regions other than Europe, and in 2023, Samsung could exclusively use a Snapdragon chip on the Galaxy S23 lineup, even though a newer version of Samsung’s in-house Exynos processor is also in the works.
What’s more, the Galaxy S23 series will also have an overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip under the hood. That was confirmed when the Galaxy S23 Ultra was listed on the Geekbench benchmark website a few weeks back, and now it’s also being confirmed for the base Galaxy S23 model.
The overclocked chipset will hopefully not affect battery life too much
However, compared to the Galaxy S23 Ultra, the benchmark scores for the regular Galaxy S23 are considerably lower. That could be because the software on the device hasn’t been finalized, though it’s also possible that the non-Ultra models (or just the smallest Galaxy S23) throttle performance in order to keep device heating under control because the smaller dimensions make dissipating heating harder than it is on the Ultra model.
In any case, it seems Samsung will use an overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip on every Galaxy S23 model. For those unaware, Qualcomm’s official figures for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 say the prime CPU (which is the fastest core) can go up to 3.19 GHz, but the benchmark listings for the Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S23 Ultra show the prime CPU clocked at 3.36GHz. The GPU is supposedly overclocked as well and runs at 719 MHz instead of 680 MHz.
Hopefully, the overclocked chip will not affect battery life. After seeing the efficiency of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is used on the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4, we are looking forward to seeing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in action on the Galaxy S23 series, and it would be a shame if Samsung messes things up for a slight increase in processor and GPU frequency.