Samsung's flagship Galaxy S series has long used both the company's own Exynos chipsets and the Snapdragon chipsets from Qualcomm. The latter would only be available in a very limited number of markets as Samsung released the Exynos-powered variant everywhere else.
That changed last year as Samsung went Snapdragon-only for the Galaxy S23 series. All three models were available with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset worldwide. That's changing again this year as Exynos has made a return, with the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ being powered by the Exynos 2400 in most markets.
Galaxy S24 Ultra uses Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 exclusively
As we've seen in the past, Samsung is going to release the Exynos 2400-powered Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ in the vast majority of markets across the globe. Only a handful of markets will get the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ‘for Galaxy' variant. These include the United States, China, Canada, and possibly Japan.
If you're curious why we've not mentioned the Galaxy S24 Ultra yet, that's because it's unique in its own right. There's no Exynos variant of the Ultra. All Galaxy S24 Ultra variants sold in all countries across the globe are powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chipset.
While Samsung fans are rightly apprehensive about the shortcomings of the Exynos compared to the Snapdragon, it's important to note that the Exynos 2400 has received meaningful improvements to its CPU, GPU, and AI performance. The GPU improvements are particularly noteworthy as the upgraded AMD RDNA3-based GPU has shown some impressive figures in all of the benchmarks we've seen so far.
There's reason to be cautiously optimistic as the situation may not be as bad as it used to be in the past. Just how well the Exynos-powered variants stack up against the Snapdragon variants can only be judged once we have all of the units in for review. Fingers crossed, for Samsung's sake, that history doesn't repeat this time around.
