The latest Galaxy S24 Ultra will ship with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. The S24 and S24 Plus will get the Exynos 2400 in some regions, and both chips have noticeable CPU performance bumps.
While the S24 lineup is not officially out yet, the leaked Geekbench scores are about 2100 for the single-core test and around 6700 for the multi-core test. The Exynos 2400, on the other hand, scores 2000 on the single-core test and 6500 on the multi-core test. That’s still slightly behind the Snapdragon variant.
We have to note that this isn’t the official score yet since Samsung’s official One UI 6 will be better optimized on the S24 Ultra once it launches. Considering the extra clock speed on some variants of the S24 Ultra, it could score higher than this. Other Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phones like the Xiaomi 14 and iQOO 12 score 2200 (single-core) and 6800 (multi-core).
However, these scores are still behind the Apple A17 Pro chip on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. The A17 Pro scores are 2700 (single-core) and 7200 (multi-core), much better than the 8 Gen 3.
However, the Exynos 2500 and the 8 Gen 4 could beat Apple’s offerings. The Cortex-X4 from ARM is about 30% slower than the A15 Pro, but the Cortex-X5 will apparently perform better. Qualcomm may or may not use this core, but MediaTek and Samsung will mostly use it. Qualcomm has its own Nuvia cores, which are very efficient, and they might match the performance or beat that of the X5 cores.
Analysts say the Cortex-X5 will bring the most significant performance boost in the last five years. ARM might finally affect Apple’s CPU performance as a result. Apple isn’t making any tremendous CPU performance leaps at the moment. The swap to TSMC 3nm chips wasn’t a major breakthrough in performance.
If the new Nuvia cores and the Cortex-X5 are powerful but not efficient, then Apple could still maintain a lead. We might see the Cortex-X5 on the 3nm (Samsung GAA) Exynos 2500 chipset that will come with the S25 and S25 Plus. We expect the custom Nuvia cores on Qualcomm. Since both are massive upgrades, they’ll allegedly beat Apple Silicon.
The other units of the S25 will get the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SOC. This chip will get custom Oryon CPU cores; we hope it’s just as power-efficient.
There’s also some news that the Exynos 2500 is custom-made only for the S25 series and optimized for it. Other Exynos chips are up for public use, and any manufacturer can use them. But given that the 8 Gen 3 is a better chip and the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 is a much better chip, no manufacturer ever uses these chips.
