There’s still a good couple of months to go until the Samsung Galaxy S24 phones are expected to break cover, but the leaks and rumors continue – and the latest batch of unconfirmed updates concern the chipsets inside these smartphones.
According to South Korean outlet The Elec (via 9to5Google), Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has gone on record as saying that his company will provide chipsets for the “majority” of the Galaxy S24 handsets that go on sale next year.
That sounds very much to us like a lot of these phones are going to come running the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and the rest will be fitted with Samsung Exynos 2400 chips. However, Amon also said that the top-end Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra model will only use Qualcomm processors.
Samsung has often used a mix of Snapdragon and Exynos chips in past Galaxy S ranges, although the Samsung Galaxy S23 phones all use Qualcomm silicon. It appears that this year, Samsung’s own processors are going to make a return – quite possibly in the handsets sold in Europe, as previously rumored.
Custom chips
There’s another detail to explore here, which is that the Galaxy S24 handsets could well get a custom version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 – one that’s slightly different to the chipset fitted in the rest of the best Android phones launched in 2024.
As per tipster Yogesh Brar (via Android Authority), there will be a bespoke ‘for Galaxy’ version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which may be released to other manufacturers as a ‘Plus’ variant of the chip at some point later in 2024.
While the prime core of this custom chip is overclocked, the two performance core clusters and the efficiency core clusters are both slightly underclocked, which is strange. Brar does say the processor will be optimized for better AI performance (we’re expecting AI to be a big focus of the Galaxy S24 phones).
This special partnership between Qualcomm and Samsung happened with this year’s Galaxy S23 phones too, so it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. All should be revealed at the start of next year, with the latest leaks pointing towards January 17 as a potential launch date for the Samsung Galaxy S24 series.