Next year’s flagship chipsets have all been revealed. Apple and Google have already launched theirs (Apple A17 with the iPhone 15 Pros and the Tensor G3 with the Pixel 8s), Samsung detailed the Exynos 2400, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and this week MediaTek brought its Dimensity 9300.
The Dimensity is the big surprise this year – can a CPU succeed with all major cores? Four Cortex-X4 and four A720 is a lot of power in more ways than one. But it’s too early to talk about benchmarks, and we have yet to see most of the phones that will be equipped with the 9300 and the other chipsets.
The major chipsets for Android phones are coming next year
So this week we want to ask another question: do you even care? Mid-range chipsets are so good these days that some of you might balk at the idea of paying extra for a flagship chip. There are also the slightly older high-end options like the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and Dimensity 9200, which are still being used for new phones in 2023.
There are some legitimate reasons for wanting the latest and greatest silicon. Efficiency continues to evolve rapidly (just compare the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and the 8+ Gen 1). Also, the latest camera advances, whether it’s a faster signal processor or a new NPU for AI, come first on the high end.
AI is also finding new use cases. You’ve probably at least tried ChatGPT (Microsoft and Google are working on integrating the functionality into their search engines), but it can also power digital assistants on the device. And image-generating models let people tap into their creative side without learning how to draw.
In the coming year, all flagship chipsets will have GPUs with hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Apple and Google have joined the club with the new A17 and Tensor G3, respectively. Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung are already entering their second generation.
Of course, not all of you will care about ray tracing. It’s mostly for gaming phones, right? Most of you probably care about camera quality – but if there’s enough processing power for it, do you care that the Tensor G3 CPU is slower than the Dimensity 9300 CPU?