Mats Hellqvist
In recent years, Samsung fans in Europe may have been a little disappointed that the flagship devices sold in these countries used Samsung’s own, arguably weaker, Exynos chipsets instead of Qualcomm’s Snapdragons. At least for the upcoming Galaxy S23 generation, Qualcomm has already given the all-clear. Only Snapdragon processors are installed worldwide, and sometimes very special ones.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra renders
According to the well-known tipster Ice Universe, Qualcomm is not only responsible for the chipsets in Europe. In fact, an exclusive high-frequency version of the just announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset is to be used in the Galaxy S23 series. If Europeans used to be jealous of the American Snapdragon models, the picture could be reversed next year.
Ice Universe published the results of an alleged benchmark test of the high-frequency version with Geekbench 5. A Galaxy S23 Ultra (model number SM-S918B) managed a single-core score of 1,504 and a multi-core score of 4,580. The Ultra ran Android 13 and had 8GB of RAM under the hood. The values are slightly lower than the tests leaked so far.
However, the Cortex-X3-based Kryo Prime core ran at 3.36GHz, versus 3.2GHz in the regular version of the processor. The frequencies of the other seven cores, on the other hand, have not changed. It is unclear how big the difference will be in real usage scenarios. At least for marketing purposes, the “fastest mobile chipset” is worth its weight in gold for Samsung.
