Samsung is dropping Exynos processors from its flagship phones and going all-in on Snapdragon solutions next year. The Galaxy S23 series will ship with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset globally. It is the company’s strategy to address performance, battery efficiency, and thermal issues with its recent flagships, particularly those powered by Exynos solutions. Moreover, the Korean behemoth is opting for a special “overclocked” version of the new Qualcomm chipset. This should in theory mean faster overall performance than phones using the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. But things are still not looking promising for Samsung.
Geekbench scores of the Galaxy S23 trio suggest performance throttling
In a Twitter thread Thursday, reputed tipster Ice Universe compared the Geekbench results of Samsung’s Galaxy S23 phones featuring the overclocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with phones from other brands featuring the regular chipset. This comparison has some interesting takeaways. The single-core scores are pretty much consistent across all devices. Perhaps the Galaxy lineup returns slightly higher scores, which bodes well for their special chipset. However, there’s something wrong with the multi-core performance of the new Samsung flagships. The scores are rather disappointing.
The Galaxy S23 trio never scored more than 5,000 in multi-core tests on Geekbench. That’s across 20 tests of both the US and global variants of all three models. On the other hand, Xiaomi and Vivo phones with the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 consistently achieved scores higher than 5,000. This is disappointing for Samsung, to say the least. Of course, the company is still working on the Galaxy S23 firmware. These scores could be reflecting unoptimized software. However, one can’t rule out the possibility of performance throttling considering the Korean behemoth’s history.
As the source speculates, Samsung may be keeping the peak performance in check to ensure that the devices don’t heat up to an uncomfortable level. The company may have reduced heat sinks on the Galaxy S23 trio to cut costs and this could be affecting the thermal management capabilities of the phones, eventually triggering performance throttling. We hope the assumption is wrong and that Samsung will not throttle the performance of Galaxy S23 phones. It would be otherwise meaningless for the company to equip the new flagships with an overclocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
With the Galaxy S23 launch supposedly happening on February 1, 2023, Samsung should soon be ready with the phones. We will keep an eye on Geekbench for new entries, potentially from phones running optimized software to see if things improve. We will keep you posted accordingly.
2022-12-23 15:07:28