Pocket-lint has been told by a reliable source that Samsung may be considering using its own Exynos hardware again for the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE and potentially the 2024 Galaxy S24 series in some regions, moving away from Snapdragon.
The return to Exynos hardware raises questions about whether fans will be happy.
While Snapdragon may still be used in the US for the Galaxy S24, Europe is currently expected to have the Exynos variant, which has previously been unpopular with some technology enthusiasts and network operators.
Can't say I'm stoked about this... Australia had Exynos for a long time and didn't get Snapdragon until the S22. I skipped the S22 when I had an S21 Ultra, but I am loving my S23U.
This Exynos chip is claimed to be awesome, but it'd be pretty impressive if it's more awesome than the Snapdragon chips.
There may still be some hope for some though, as Wood also said: "I'd be surprised if Samsung decided to return to Exynos for the important European market, but we might see it in some smaller markets to ensure Samsung's in-house platform stays in the game. There's also likely an element of Samsung wanting to keep Qualcomm on its toes too, which may be what is driving these recent rumours."
I had an Exynos dual-SIM S21U and it was pretty fine. I kind of miss it because my current S23U is a regular North American model with a locked bootloader.
I bought a Galaxy Note 3 way back when, they promised the Exynos chip that generation was a significant innovation with it's 8 cores (BIG.little) and would be better than the Snapdragon version. In reality, it would overheat, the camera was worse, the modem had issues. Oh, and most games didn't perform correctly due to GPU drivers being absolutely insanely broken.
Fast forward to the launch of the Galaxy S10 and here in Brazil it was Exynos based. Surely, a decade later, those issues should be gone right? Nope, the exact same nightmare: phone overheats if you barely look at it, camera quality was worse, modem had issues. GPU drivers were slightly better, but still horrendous.
I'm not falling for this a third time. My current Snapdragon S23 runs like a dream, in fact, it's cooler to the touch while playing an intensive game than my S10 browsing my photo library.
Either give me a TSMC fabbed Snapdragon, or I'll ignore that device. No Samsung fabbed SoCs for me. Memory yes, storage yes, screens yes... SoCs? Never again.