A recent performance benchmark for an upcoming Nubia phone more or less confirms that Samsung will use a special version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC for the Galaxy S24, due to be released early next year.
The Galaxy S24+ appeared on Geekbench last month. That benchmark entry confirmed that the upcoming Samsung flagship is powered by a new Qualcomm chipset. However, at that time, we had no point of comparison with other upcoming smartphones that will also employ the next-gen Qualcomm chip. Now, we do.
A newer Geekbench entry for the Nubia “NX769J,” which is believed to be the upcoming RedMagic 9, revealed that the Nubia phone has the same “pineapple” motherboard and “walt” governor as the Galaxy S24+ (via gamma0burst). In other words, both phones will be powered by the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC.
However, it turns out that Samsung will equip the Galaxy S24 with a beefed-up version of the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. It's another SoC labeled “for Galaxy.”
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Samsung and Qualcomm to create another “for Galaxy” exclusive chip
The “regular” Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip has a base frequency of 2.26GHz, two CPU cores clocked at 2.27GHz, 5 cores running at 2.96GHz, and one core operating at 3.19GHz.
Those appear to be the specifications for the standard version of the chip. The Galaxy S24+, however, has a different configuration. Instead of rocking 2+5+1 CPU cores, the Galaxy S24 chip has four CPU clusters in the 2+2+3+1 arrangement.
The “for Galaxy” Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has the same 2.26GHz base frequency and 2.27GHz frequency on the first two CPU cores. However, the three-core cluster is clocked at 3.15GHz instead of 2.96GHz, and the single high-performance core runs at 3.30GHz, up from 3.19GHz.
All this suggests that Samsung and Qualcomm will continue the partnership they started earlier this year when the Galaxy S23 was announced with an exclusive “for Galaxy” Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. The upcoming Galaxy S24 series will also be powered by a “for Galaxy” Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, which will perform better than the standard variant.
Nevertheless, there is a possibility that Qualcomm will eventually release an equally powerful version of the “for Galaxy” chip for other OEMs to use later in 2024. We can make this assumption because there's a new RedMagic 8S Pro in town, and it appears to sport a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 version that shares the same specs as the Galaxy S23 chip, thus negating that early Samsung exclusivity.
