Samsung Galaxy S23’s chip is better than the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Here’s how.

You may have noticed that Samsung’s Galaxy S23 series has a special version of Qualcomm’s most powerful mobile chip called the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy.

Awkward name aside, in his promotional materials(Opens in a new window) According to Samsung, the new chip offers “more than 40% GPU and NPU” and has been “optimized exclusively for Galaxy”. But what exactly does that mean?

In a press release (via XDA Developers(Opens in a new window)), Qualcomm announced(Opens in a new window) more details on the exact specifications of the chip. First, the primary clock speed has increased from 3.2GHz to 3.36GHz and the GPU clock speed has increased from 680MHz to 719MHz. Simply put, the new chip is faster than the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and you’ll see it in benchmarks, but in real life the difference probably won’t be very noticeable.

There are other improvements. The new chip leverages Snapdragon Cognitive ISP technology to enable real-time semantic segmentation for image processing. This is a technology that uses deep learning to identify different objects in the image, which should hopefully result in better image quality.

Finally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy appears to have an updated Snapdragon Hexagon processor, which should improve overall AI performance. One area where this should make itself felt is in better noise-cancellation when making calls, according to Qualcomm.

It’s hard to say how noticeable all of these changes will be in real-world use, but they definitely have something to offer. Qualcomm typically releases a “Plus” variant of its flagship chips every year, and XDA Developers points out that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy has been improved to the point of essentially calling it the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 will, although it is unclear what the company’s plans are this point.