For the past several years, Samsung has sold its flagship smartphones in two processor variants depending on the market. Buyers in the USA and China usually got Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets, while the devices came with the company’s in-house Exynos processors in most other markets. It added India to the Snapdragon fold with the Galaxy S22 series this year. With the top three biggest smartphone markets getting Qualcomm chipsets, the proportion of Exynos processors on Galaxy S22 phones came down to just about 30 percent. And next year, that could be zero, with the Galaxy S23 lineup getting Snapdragon processors globally.
The Exynos 2300 isn’t good enough for the Galaxy S23 series
As said earlier, the performance gap between Exynos 2300 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the reasoning behind this decision from Samsung. Unfortunately, this isn’t new or something unheard of. This gap has been widely documented over the years. Snapdragon-powered Galaxy flagships always outperformed their Exynos-powered siblings, leading to strong criticism of Samsung. The performance gap was far less, perhaps negligible, this year — between Exynos 2200 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 — than in previous years. That’s evidently because Samsung Foundry manufactured both chipsets. Qualcomm’s processors were manufactured by TSMC in the past. The Taiwanese chipmaker fabrication technology has historically proved to be superior to that of Samsung. Qualcomm is now reverting to TSMC for the manufacturing of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Early reports suggest it will deliver significantly higher performance and power efficiency than Samsung’s in-house Exynos 2300. The gap is too high for Samsung to still use both processors in the Galaxy S23 series. The South Korean behemoth wouldn’t risk losing sales due to underperforming devices. As such, it’d only use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in its next-gen flagships. That said, these are unconfirmed reports. There’s still a long way to go before the Exynos 2300 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 enter production. Things could change by then. We will keep you posted.
Exynos 2300 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 are 4nm chips
It’s pertinent to mention here that both Exynos 2300 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will be 4nm chipsets, the same as preceding solutions. Yes, Samsung has begun mass production of 3nm processors and TSMC will also join its South Korean rival in manufacturing the next-gen chips later this year. But 3nm mobile processors aren’t expected to arrive until next year. Samsung’s initial 3nm chips will power high-performance computing systems. The company plans to develop custom 3nm processors for its flagship smartphones in the future.
