Several devices powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 were spotted on Geekbench including what is believed to be the vivo X90 Pro, iQOO 11, and the Samsung Galaxy S23 series.
The last of which showed that the Prime core, Performance cores, and Efficiency cores were clocked at 3.36GHz, 2.80GHz, and 2.02GHz, respectively.
Meanwhile, the latter two had their Prime cores clocked at 3.19GHz. This is the same as the value given by Qualcomm, which to be more exact is 3.1872GHz.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Series
According to leakster Ice Universe, the European versions will use an “exclusive high-frequency version” of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 explaining the higher clock speeds of the Prime cores. But the variants on Geekbench were the US models, which may mean that the high-frequency variant is global rather than unique to Europe.
A higher clock speed option of Qualcomm’s chipsets isn’t too new. The company has occasionally introduced “AC” versions of its SoCs that offer higher clock speeds than the base chip. The Snapdragon 855 is an example of this, with the model number SM8150. The AC variant, the SM8150-AC is the 855+ that boosted the Prime core from 2.84GHz to 2.96GHz.
If this is indeed the case, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 on the Samsung Galaxy S23 series should launch with the model number SM8550-AC instead of SM8550-AB on the base option.
The base Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is said to be faster by 35% in CPU performance and 25% in GPU performance than its predecessor. If the Galaxy S23 series does have faster clock speeds, then this performance increase should be higher.
It is too early to see how big of a difference this is though in the real world, so we’ll have to wait for official releases.
Ram found his love and appreciation for writing in 2015 having started in the gaming and esports sphere for GG Network. He would then transition to focus more on the world of tech which has also began his journey into learning more about this world. That said though, he still has the mentality of "as long as it works" for his personal gadgets.
