Samsung unpacks the Galaxy S24 with Snapdragon and Exynos silicon

With today’s announcement of the full family of Samsung Galaxy S24 smartphones, there is a lot to UNPACK (get it?) and you’ll no doubt see dozens of articles of commentary on the devices. The device that caught everyone’s eye was the Galaxy S24 Ultra, that looks to be the king of flagship phones for 2024, offering awesome camera capability (zoom and low light stand out), ray tracing support for the latest mobile games, up to 1TB of storage, and a 6.8” display. Oh, and it’s built with titanium now, go figure.

The heart of this new device is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, first announced at the company’s Snapdragon Summit back in late October. This SoC has 8 CPU cores (one Arm Cortex-X4, five Cortex-A720, two Cortex-A520) that the company claims offers 30% better performance over the previous gen, an updated Adreno GPU that is 25% faster, and maybe you’ve heard of this thing called AI? The integrated Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) is more than 40% faster than last year’s model thanks to hardware and drastic software improvements from the engineering team.

At the Snapdragon Summit we got to see some interesting AI demos including custom Qualcomm applications for generative AI, but Samsung leaned into the AI story heavily today. The event focused on Galaxy AI, the platform from which the company is making its play into AI for its whole range of consumer products. Much of the Unpacked presentation today focused on the AI applications and use cases, really getting into the meat of the software before even touching on the handsets themselves. A telling statement from Samsung.

By far the coolest demo that was shown was called “Circle to Search” courtesy of Google. Imagine that anything you are looking at on your screen, from a social media post to a YouTube video to a picture someone sends you in a message, and you can simply draw a circle around with your finger or stylus and the AI-based image recognition model will find what it is and provide relevant context and search results. The examples Samsung showed were impressive, and I am curious to see how first hands-on experiences go. But it is THIS kind of simplicity that we need from AI integrations to really get the mainstream adoption that the market is looking for.

There were quite a few other great demos including a lot of generative AI for image and video edits, an LLM-based chat bot, notes summarization, and some real time translation capabilities. Overall, I think Samsung did a solid job making the case for consumer-facing AI in a mobile device.

The great news is that for the Galaxy S24 Ultra, all regions will see this smartphone powered by that Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. No compromises, no confusion, no debate on whether you got “the best one.”

For the S24 Plus and base S24 models, Samsung is still going the route of the split design, with some regions getting phones using Snapdragon chips and other regions on Samsung’s own Exynos platform. The Exynos 2400 still looks interesting, including a 10-core CPU design (X4, A720, and A520 inclusive), GPU based on AMD Radeon RDNA3 IP, and its own NPU (combining two different levels of NPU, though no one quite knows the IP integration yet). Benchmarks will be interesting to see comparing it to the Snapdragon silicon to see why Samsung made the decision to solo-source the S24 Ultra like it did.

The Wi-Fi on ALL the new Galaxy S24 phones is powered by the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 chip. Interestingly, though it is capable of Wi-Fi 7 support, only the S24 Ultra that has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in it will have Wi-Fi 7 enabled. A choice that might come down to wanting to segment the flagship features and capabilities all together. All the S24 devices are using the Qualcomm in-display fingerprint sensor as well, 3D Sonic Gen 2.

It is always interesting to see where Samsung, the clear leader in the Android smartphone market, places its bets for the year with its silicon investment. Clearly Qualcomm still has a performance lead, a marketing and brand lead, in order to capture this much of the market. The Exynos 2400 integration in some markets with the non-flagship devices remains an interesting choice, and probably comes down to cost and margins as the price of the phones comes down.

There is a lot riding on both the 2024 market for smartphone upgrades AND PC upgrades thanks to the AI wave we are getting hammered with. Device makers, and their silicon partners like Qualcomm, need to be pushing for these truly innovative solutions and capabilities to enter the mainstream zeitgeist to get consumers in the door and buying. It’s a challenge to get past the initial “wow” of ChatGPT that sparked a lot of this momentum, but I believe we have the technology products to do it.