A recent performance benchmark of the Nubia Red Magic 9 more or less confirms that Samsung will exclusively use a special version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC for the Galaxy S24, which is expected to launch early next year.

The Galaxy S24+ appeared on Geekbench last month. That benchmark list confirmed that Samsung's next flagship model will use the new high-end SoC from Qualcomm.

However, it turns out that Samsung will equip the Galaxy S24 with an upgraded version of the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. It's a different SoC with the suffix "for Galaxy". This information was discovered after the Red Magic 9 also recently appeared on Geekbench with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor but with a different configuration than the processor found in the Galaxy S24+.

Specifically, the “regular” Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip has a base frequency of 2.26GHz, two CPU cores running at 2.27GHz, 5 cores running at 2.96GHz, and one core operating at 3/19GHz. Meanwhile, instead of using a 2+5+1 CPU core configuration, the Galaxy S24 chip has 4 CPU clusters in a 2+2+3+1 arrangement.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 “for Galaxy” has the same base frequencies of 2.26GHz and 2.27GHz on the first two CPU cores. However, the three-core cluster is clocked at 3/15GHz instead of 2.96GHz, and the single high-performance core runs at 3.30GHz, up from 3/19GHz.

All of this suggests that Samsung and Qualcomm will continue the partnership they started earlier this year when the Galaxy S23 was announced with the “Galaxy-specific” Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. The upcoming Galaxy S24 series will also be equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 “for Galaxy” chip, promising better performance than the standard variant. Let's wait and see!