The career of Exynos is over, so European buyers can finally breathe a sigh of relief: Samsung launched the S23 family with a special edition for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Galaxy phones, but the latter is not only compared to the Exynos 2200, but also compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 advances in both performance and heat treatment.
The Samsung Galaxy S23 family stepped up in terms of hardware [+]
Samsung’s Qualcomm chip deploys a 3.36 GHz Cortex-X3, two 2.8 GHz Cortex-A715, two 2.8 GHz Cortex-A710 and three 2 GHz Cortex-A510 processor cores supported by the overclocked variation of the Adreno 740. However, only the S23+ and S23 Ultra start with 256 GB of UFS 4.0 storage. It seems like an unnecessary saving, just as you can’t be proud of the 25-watt charging compared to the 45 watts of the smaller model’s brothers.
But that’s not the point, but the fact that for a chip that is also better in terms of consumption, a larger heat dissipation system than last year’s was installed in all three housings, and we also compared the S22+ with the S23+ above while recording 8K footage, measuring their heating with a FLiR thermal camera. Despite the fact that the S22+ can only record at 24 fps compared to the sequel’s 30, the predecessor heated up even more, specifically by 4 degrees in six minutes around the chip, but the novelty remained cooler in the performance tests as well.
| Performance test (the table can be opened) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benchmark | Samsung Galaxy S23 | Samsung Galaxy S23+ | Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra | Samsung Galaxy S22+ | Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra | Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max |
| System chip | Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy | Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy | Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy | Exynos 2200 | Exynos 2200 | Apple A16 Bionic |
| AnTuTu 9.x | 1160535 points | 1212706 points | 1198251 points | 858891 points | 865130 points | 952950 points |
| Geekbench 5 (single/multi) | 1556 / 4953 points | 1544 / 4927 points | 1582 / 4968 points | 1115 / 3368 points | 1115 / 3368 points | 1889 / 5502 point |
| GFXBench Car Chase onscreen | 109 fps | 108 fps | 67 fps (QHD) | 58 fps | 33 fps (QHD) | 60 fps |
| GFXBench Car Chase offscreen | 129 fps | 128 fps | 127 fps | 68 fps | 68 fps | 119 fps |
| GFXBench Man. onscreen | 120 fps | 120 fps | 120 fps (QHD) | 119 fps | 96 fps (QHD) | 60 fps |
| GFXBench Man. offscreen | 313 fps | 313 fps | 316 fps | 179 fps | 179 fps | 280 fps |
| AndroBench Sequential Read | 1689.85 MB/s | 3392.91 MB/s | 3455.36 MB/s | 1320.15 MB/s | 1617.93 MB/s | – |
| AndroBench Sequential Write | 448.16 MB/s | 2003.01 MB/s | 2442.09 MB/s | 1091.15 MB/s | 981.61 MB/s | – |
| AndroBench Random Read | 326.71 MB/s | 451.18 MB/s | 448.09 MB/s | 379.68 MB/s | 306.92 MB/s | – |
| AndroBench Random Write | 134.38 MB/s | 144.34 MB/s | 156.89 MB/s | 545.89 MB/s | 271.08 MB/s | – |
All this while the performance advantage of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy over the Exynos 2200 is astonishingly large: in Geekbench, the processor progress is on average 40%, and the GFX Bench tests normalized to FHD resolution indicated an average score of 80% higher. The sequential read-write speed advantage of UFS 4.0 storage is also rough, which of course the smallest S23 does not benefit from. For random reading, however, the picture is mixed. The throne of the iPhone 14 Pro and the Apple A16 Bionic processor is still unshakable, but in AnTuTu and 3D, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 For Galaxy now has the advantage. Of course, as always, the many scores may be indicative, but the quality of everyday use decides how much practical progress is made, and we are working hard on the detailed tests of the three new Samsung phones.
