You may have noticed that Samsung’s Galaxy S23 series phones are equipped with a special version of Qualcomm’s most powerful mobile chip called the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy.
Aside from the awkward name, in its promotional materials(opens in new window) Samsung says the new chips offer “40% more GPU and NPU” and are “optimized specifically for the Galaxy.” But what does that mean exactly?
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Press release (via XDA Developers)(opens in new window)), Qualcomm Shared(opens in new window) Details about the exact specifications of the chip. First, the primary clock speed has increased from 3.2GHz to 3.36GHz, and the GPU clock speed has increased from 680MHz to 719MHz. Simply put, the new chip is faster than the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and while we can see it in our benchmarks, the difference won’t be too noticeable in practice.
There are other improvements as well. This new chip uses Snapdragon Cognitive ISP technology to enable real-time semantic segmentation for image processing. This is a technique that uses deep learning to identify different objects in an image, and should hopefully result in better quality photos.
Finally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy appears to feature an upgraded Snapdragon Hexagon processor, which should improve AI performance across the board. The first is improved noise cancellation during calls.
It’s hard to say how noticeable all these changes will be in real-world use, but they definitely amount to something. , XDA Developers point out that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy is essentially improved enough to be called the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2, though it’s unclear what the company’s plans are in this regard. .
