What’s special inside Galaxy S23’s exclusive Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip?
The Galaxy S23 is Samsung’s first smartphone series to use a custom Snapdragon processor. This is a higher clocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset which was announced a few months ago. According to official figures, the Prime CPU core inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy is clocked at 3.36 GHz (0.16 GHz faster than the vanilla chip), and the Adreno 740 GPU is clocked at 719 MHz (39 MHz more). But that’s not all, this chip has some additional features.
The higher CPU clock speed and faster GPU translate to faster performance when opening apps and games, multitasking, gaming, and even booting up the device. Combined with faster LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 storage, the Galaxy S23 is 34% faster in CPU workloads, 41% faster in games, and 49% faster in machine learning tasks. Samsung claims the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 For Galaxy is the fastest Snapdragon chipset in the world. Moreover, it comes with a better ISP for better camera performance.
Samsung announced on stage at the Galaxy Unpacked 2023 event that it is working with Qualcomm to bring exclusive features and optimizations to the Galaxy S23 with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 For Galaxy chipset. It’s the first Snapdragon processor to use Qualcomm’s new Cognitive ISP. This small part of the chipset performs real-time semantic segmentation (which Samsung calls the AI Object-Aware Engine) to enhance images from the phone’s camera. It uses AI and ML to understand what’s happening in the scene, then processes each object, subject, and background separately to make images look more natural.
The new phones from the South Korean firm can capture improved images in low light conditions. Thanks to the new ISP, the Galaxy S23 is also the first Android smartphone capable of capturing 4K 60fps Super HDR video using both the front and rear cameras. It can also record Super Steady videos in QHD resolution (upgrade from 1080p resolution in Galaxy S22) and portrait videos in 4K 30fps (upgrade from last year’s 1080p resolution), matching the series iPhone 14 Pro.
You can watch our Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, and Galaxy S23 Ultra hands-on videos below.
Samsung Galaxy S23
Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra