New Samsung Leak Confirms Powerful Galaxy S24 Design Decisions

Updated January 7: article originally posted January 6. As the anticipation for this month's Galaxy Unpacked event rises, critical decisions around the Samsung Galaxy S24 smartphones have been revealed. Two Samsung Galaxy Ultra smartphones (Photo by Jung Yeon je / AFP) Following the launch of Samsung’s Exynos 2400 chipset , the South Korean company will offer the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ with its own Exynos chipset or Qualcomm's customised "Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 For Samsung.” This decision has put the community on edge.

This mixed chipset approach —with the chipset received completely dependent on where you purchase your new smartphone—is one that Samsung has traditionally used. used on numerous Galaxy S ranges. In those cases, the Snapdragon equipped handset offered more performance and endurance over the similarly specced Exynos equipped handsets.

Early benchmarks revealed during testing of the various S24 and S24+ handsets showed the Exynos handsets lagging behind the Snapdragon handsets . This was in late October, leaving more than two months for Samsung to optimise the handsets and find more performance in silicon. Benchmarks from Geekbench —presumably on final hardware and release software—show an increase of 6.1 per cent for single core operations and 5.8 per cent for multi core on the Galaxy S24+.

The Geekbench number also shows a 2.8 per cent and 4.4 per cent improvement since late October for the Snapdragon handsets. Samsung’s Exynos chipset is getting closer to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, but the latter remains the more powerful choice. It looks like Samsung’s decision to run two different variants will remain a point of contention for those in the community wanting the best performance possible from their new flagship phone.

South Korean Samsung store (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images) Update: Sunday January 7: While every Galaxy S24 Ultra is guaranteed to ship with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, guaranteeing that every user will receive the top performance option, the decision on which territories will pick up the Snapdragon and which will pick up the Exynos has yet to be confirmed.

One source suggests that Samsung wants to satisfy as many Galaxy S24+ users as possible, with the majority of S24+ handsets worldwide shipping with the Snapdragon chipset. The vanilla Galaxy S24 would offset this by only using the Exynos chipset. It should be noted that this split across territories doesn’t tie in with previous Galaxy S splits, and the idea of the lowest placed handset running just on Exynos would stand in opposition to the recently launched Galaxy S23 FE, which shipped with both Exynos and Snapdragon.

Whatever the final decision is, some in the Samsung community will be disappointed. The Galaxy S24 family, including the S24 Ultra and S Pen, are expected to launch at the upcoming “ Galaxy Unpacked ” event on January 17th. Now read how Samsung will use AI to improve photography on the Galaxy S24 family....