Qualcomm’s next flagship chip is fast approaching – and Samsung’s top models may be among the first to make commercial use of it, judging by the fresh results that are starting to appear on the Geekbench test database
The end of the year 2022 is already clearly visible on the horizon, which means that the announcement of the flagship chips for the smartphones of 2023, which traditionally takes place a little before the announcement of the devices themselves, is also close – with another interesting evidence of this coming to us from the Geekbench performance test that provides an initial taste of the expected capabilities of The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 from Qualcomm.
The next flagship chip of the American chip developer will be based on TSMC’s N4 (or 4 nm, theoretically) manufacturing process, like the current Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, with an unusual array that includes no less than four processing clusters: one senior Cortex-X3 core and especially large with an operating frequency of up to 3.3GHz, a pair of updated large Cortex-A715 cores with an operating frequency of 2.8GHz, another pair of large Cortex-A710 cores with a frequency of up to 2.8GHz that we have already met in Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (and in Dimension 9000 of Mediatek) and three more economical Cortex-A510 cores at a frequency of up to 2GHz, which will be a relative reduction compared to the current generation models with four modest Cortex-A510 cores that operate at a similar frequency.
This extended hybrid approach, with odd numbers that we are not used to seeing in the world of processors (the last time we got three processing cores of the same type was in the AMD Phenom era), looks a little strange on paper – but according to recent rumors it manages to prove the itself with an increase of about 20 percent to the efficiency of operation in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 compared to the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, without changing the lithography of the chip itself. On top of that, early results from “unknown” Samsung devices also indicate a healthy improvement in performance in addition to efficiency, with gains of around 10 percent to 15 percent in multi-core test scores and Geekbench 5 leading-core test scores.
Those unknown Samsung devices almost certainly belong to the Galaxy S23 family, of course, assuming that the Korean giant does not make a major revolution against all odds in their mobile strategy, and most popular leakers now agree that these impressive features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 helped tip the scales towards neglect Full of Exynos chips – so that in the coming year all S23 models all over the world will be Snapdragon-based only, apparently.
