Galaxy S23 to use Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with an overclocked GPU

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor went official last week, but Samsung was mysteriously missing from Qualcomm’s official partners’ list. It was later reported that the South Korean firm could use a special version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with a higher-clocked CPU. Now, it looks like the company’s upcoming high-end phones will use a higher-clocked GPU, too.

The standard version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (SM8550-AB) features a prime CPU (Cortex-X3) core clocked at 3.19GHz, four mid CPU cores clocked at 2.8GHz, three power-efficient CPU cores (Cortex-A510) clocked at 2GHz, and the Adreno 740 GPU clocked at 680MHz. In comparison, it appears that the Galaxy S23 will use a variant of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor (SM8550-AC) with its prime CPU core clocked at 3.36GHz and the GPU clocked at 719MHz. But to tame this overclocked chipset, Samsung also needs to use a suitable cooling mechanism.

Qualcomm occasionally releases higher-clocked versions of its flagship smartphone chipsets with a model number ending AC. For instance, the Snapdragon 855 had the model number SM8150, while the Snapdragon 855+ with a higher-clocked CPU had the model number SM8150-AC. It isn’t clear what this chipset would be called: Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Pro, Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2, or something else.

The standard Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is claimed to be a 35% faster CPU and a 25% faster GPU compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. But more important is that Qualcomm has focused on improving the power efficiency of its latest flagship chipset, as its chips from the past two generations tended to overheat and throttle under sustained load.