What you need to know
- Samsung announced its new flagship mobile processor, the Exynos 2400, on Friday.
- The Exynos 2400 offers a 1.7x CPU boost and a 14.7x AI boost compared to the 2200.
- Samsung canceled the Exynos 2300 and used the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 globally for the Galaxy S23 series; rumors suggest it'll use the 2400 for some Galaxy S24 phones.
Samsung has announced its new Exynos 2400 chipset, designed to compete against other new and upcoming flagship chips like Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Tensor G3, and Dimensity 9300. It shows plenty of major performance gains on paper, especially for generative AI. But will it be enough to shake Exynos' shaky track record in recent years?
According to Samsung, the 4nm Exynos 2400 shows a "1.7x increase in CPU performance and a remarkable 14.7x boost in AI performance" compared to the Exynos 2200, which was used for European Galaxy S22 phones. It can also power a 200MP camera sensor.
The Samsung Exynos brand took a hit this year when Samsung chose to use Snapdragon chips globally for the Galaxy S23 series. The Exynos 2200, in particular, struggled with battery life, efficiency, and gaming performance, which may have contributed to Samsung's decision to leave the Exynos 2300 unused.
This year, however, rumors strongly suggest that Samsung intends to use this Exynos 2400 chip in Europe for the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus rather than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Allegedly, the S24 Ultra will use the Snapdragon worldwide.
While the Galaxy S24 could very well remain one of the best Android phones, it's intriguing that Samsung has gone right back to a two-tiered silicon approach to its flagship phone a year after Qualcomm gave Samsung an exclusive overclocked Snapdragon chip for the S23.
That's why it's important to see what the Exynos 2400 will bring to the table. The fact that Samsung uses the two-year-old Exynos 2200 as a point of reference for the 2400 makes it difficult to judge for now.
Like the Pixel 8 with its Tensor-powered AI trickery, the Exynos-backed Galaxy S24 will have more AI capacity for tools like "text-to-image AI generation," something Samsung hinted at during its System LSI Tech Day 2023 event in San Jose.
Samsung also promised to use "AI-based tracking technology" to capture fast-moving objects at 4X zoom "without any image degradation."
Samsung hasn't yet revealed the Exynos 2400 cores, but Phone Arena claims that it'll use a Cortex-X4 core clocked at 3.19GHz, five Cortex-A720 cores, and four Cortex-A520 cores. While this configuration matches the (alleged) Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU exactly, that chip will be clocked noticeably higher for all ten cores, giving Qualcomm phones the edge.
As for the GPU, Samsung said it will use the Xclipse 940 GPU "based on the latest AMD RDNA 3 architecture." It apparently has "enhanced ray tracing capability" and new optical upgrades, but it's unclear how much faster it performs compared to the Xclipse 920 — which itself offered ray tracing.
