Samsung has made the Galaxy S24 line official and the company’s goal to completely integrate AI into its phones is out there for everyone to see. It’s an ambitious project — especially from Samsung, which isn’t exactly a household name when it comes to AI.
Galaxy AI — while it’s really interesting and the smart thing to showcase while unveiling yet another smartphone — isn’t the only thing about the launch worth talking about. Buried by news of a seven-year update cycle and the possibility that the phone’s features could turn into a subscription model was the fact that Samsung is once again using its own in-house Exynos processor in many parts of the world.
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As you might expect, a lot of people outside the U.S. aren’t very happy to find out that the Galaxy S24 or S24 Plus they can buy will be powered by Samsung’s Exynos 2400 SoC instead of the latest from Qualcomm. Last year, Samsung used Qualcomm chips for the Galaxy S23 across the board, and it seemed that the company had relented and ceded the space to the Taiwanese chipmaker.
I think they shouldn’t be so concerned that they may somehow be getting an inferior product and consider that perhaps, with this go around, the Exynos is the better model to buy.
There is only one thing that could go wrong, and neither is a result of having an Exynos processor. A phone chip is designed to run as fast as software tells it to run, for as long as software tells it to run. The chip is just millions of switches, and it will work as designed until it is told to stop or burns out because it wasn’t told to stop.
All processors are like this, and the software that powers everything has to be designed to get the required performance when it’s needed while still being safe and energy-efficient. The trick is doing this while you’ve got the chip tucked away inside a metal and glass hotbox like a phone.
The new Exynos 2400 is fast, has a great GPU and a new NPU, and, on its own, is stronger and faster than anything the company has designed in the past. The potential for it to be great is there. With the right phone design — Samsung told us about its all-new heat dissipation system inside the S24 — and the proper balance between raw number crunching and energy efficiency, there is no reason it won’t be on par with Qualcomm’s offering. Unless, of course, you use it in North America, where Qualcomm has an almost anticompetitive advantage when it comes to network performance.
And since Samsung isn’t going to make an Exynos-powered S25 a millimeter thicker than the Snapdragon version, it will take plenty of testing and tweaking to make sure it doesn’t run too hot. That’s something Google struggles with on the Pixel line, which also uses an Exynos-based chip with its Tensor SoC, so Samsung has plenty of data about what it needs to do here.
Speaking of Google and Exynos and AI, that’s where things get really interesting.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon is capable of doing any of the AI tricks Samsung is leaning on to make the Galaxy S24 something you’ll want to buy. But as we’ve seen from Google’s Pixel, building an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) designed to interpret and run code in a very specific way is a lot better when the AI algorithms are written to leverage it.
A Pixel phone may not be the best choice when it comes to longevity or gaming prowess, but when you’re running Google’s AI “stuff,” it can do more than the competition and do it faster and more efficiently.
Samsung isn’t giving any hard technical details, but much of the AI it showed us is powered by or built upon Google’s work. Algorithms that were written to work best with the NPU inside an Exynos-based Tensor SoC.
While Samsung probably (there could be some sort of licensing in place) can’t just copy Google and build the same NPU inside the Exynos 2400, it sure can be influenced by it. If this is the case, Galaxy AI tools will work better on the Exynos S24 and will have to be dumbed down or held back to have feature parity with the Qualcomm version. Yes, I’m saying when it comes to Galaxy AI, the Exynos S24 is probably the better S24.
What Samsung needs to do is properly thermal manage the chip so the battery lasts and it doesn’t overheat. The rest is already in place to make the two versions of the S24 feel and look the same.