The Samsung Galaxy S24 could be powered by a special edition chipset

Samsung Galaxy S23 hands on back lilac
The Galaxy S23 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)

We're not expecting to see the Samsung Galaxy S24 series until the early part of next year, but by that time it looks as though we'll know just about every spec offered by these phones – including the chipset that powers them.

The team at SamMobile has compared two recently posted benchmarks – one thought to be from the Nubia RedMagic 9 and one thought to be from the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus – and suggests that the latter phone will have a special edition processor inside.

Both these handsets are expected to run on the as-yet-unannounced Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, but the configuration listings attached to the leaked benchmarks show some subtle differences between processor specs.

Each chipset is made up of cores (individual processing units), and these are apparently laid out differently and running at slightly faster speeds on the Samsung Galaxy 24 Plus compared with the RedMagic 9 from Nubia.

Phone power

As you may remember from earlier in the year, Qualcomm and Samsung partnered together to create a custom version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor for the handsets in the Samsung Galaxy S23 range – so it looks like this partnership is continuing.

That bespoke Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was later made available to other manufacturers as well, but Samsung got it first. It seems likely that a similar arrangement could be in place as we go through the flagship Android phones of 2024.

There's been plenty of speculation around the chipset that'll be showing up in the Samsung Galaxy S24 range, with rumors that Samsung will go back to its previous approach of fitting its own Exynos processors inside some versions of the phone.

That wasn't the strategy with the Galaxy S23, as all three of those phones got Snapdragon silicon inside them. At this stage of course, it's still not clear exactly how powerful the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be – but it should launch before the end of 2023.

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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

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