After a rocky few months in terms of leaks, the Samsung Galaxy S23 is, suddenly, starting to look like it's going to be among the very best Android phones on the market when released in early 2023.
And, now, building the hype for S23 even more, we've just got confirmation that the Samsung Galaxy S23 range of handsets is going to come, throughout Europe, with Qualcomm's brand new flagship system-on-chip (SoC), the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Not only is the Samsung Galaxy S23 coming with the Snapdragon 8 Gen2 mobile processor, though, but it is coming with a 'high-performance version exclusive to Samsung'. And one look at the leaked benchmark scores for the Gen2 point to a big upgrade over the Samsung Galaxy S22's Exynos 2200 SoC.
In Geekbench 5 benchmarks the Exynos 2200-powered Galaxy S22 posted a single-core score of 1,079 and a multi-core score of 3,109, while this new 'high-performance' Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered Galaxy S23 is shown to post scores of 1,504 and 4,580 respectively. That's a big jump.
This confirmation comes from Samsung's own leakster-in-chief, Ice universe, who wrote on Twitter:
"Breaking! The best moment for European users has arrived. The European version of the Samsung Galaxy S23 series is confirmed to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and it is a high-frequency version exclusive to Samsung. Please enjoy it."
Ice had also previously stated that S23 was going to be based solely on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, adding weight to the claim and pointing now very clearly to a global Galaxy S23 release utilizing the new flagship Qualcomm system-on-chip, as Galaxy phones already ship in North America with Snapdragon processors.
The T3 take: Huzzah! Samsung is binning Exynos for Galaxy S23
Honestly, this will truly be music to the ears of Samsung Galaxy phone users, as well as Android phone buyers who only want to use one of the best phones in terms of speed, power, and performance.
This is because Samsung's Exynos system-on-chip has, to put it bluntly, been consistently and widely criticized for its inferior performance to Qualcomm's Android phone processors.
This has meant that Samsung's flagship Galaxy phones for quite a while now have been shipping in Europe and other parts of the world, too, with a weaker processor than in other parts of the world, creating two tiers of performance within a single phone range. North America Galaxy phones got Snapdragon, while Europe got Exynos.
That's was just the start of the problem, though, as these Exynos processors were not just beaten by Qualcomm but they were also comfortably beaten by Apple Silcon, too. This meant that Exynos processors weren't just second best, but they were third best in terms of performance when you factored in the best iPhones, too. That's hardly something that sparks joy or communicates that the Exynos-powered Galaxy truly is a flagship.
So the fact that it now looks almost certain that the S23 series will launch, worldwide, with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is really exciting. Yes, sure, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2's performance doesn't look like it will match Apple Silicon's A16 Bionic scores, such as the 1,873 single-core and 5,352 multi-score scores posted by the iPhone 14 Pro Max. But it does look like it will be very fast and competitive, as well as crucially being the best Android can offer.
Overall, then, this is excellent news for the Android phone market, and for Samsung Galaxy fans who had become disillusioned by year-after-year of sub-optimal Exynos processor performance in the South Korean maker's flagships.
