The Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus is undoubtedly going to be a powerful phone, but it could still outshine Apple – and not just the iPhone 15 Pro, which is expected to come before the Galaxy S24 line, but even the iPhone 14 Pro in some ways from last year.
At least that’s the impression a Geekbench benchmark gives. This offer – spotted by Notebook check – doesn’t mention the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus by name, but it’s for a Samsung phone with a codename that matches what we expect from this handset, and has been shown to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset.
That’s as expected given the Samsung Galaxy S23 line uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but the performance isn’t quite as good as you might have hoped.
The phone achieves a single-core result of 2,233 and a multi-core result of 6,661. For reference, the iPhone 14 Pro has a single-core score of 2,511 and a multi-core score of 6,347 in Geekbench’s iOS benchmark chartswith the iPhone 14 Pro Max achieving similar results.
Higher is better here, so Apple’s 2022 flagships outperform the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus in single-core results, but come out slightly lower for multi-core based on this benchmark. At least Samsung beats the standard iPhone 14 for single-core tasks, but that phone uses an older chipset, so it’s no wonder.
And while Samsung may have beaten Apple’s current top phones for multi-core results, they won’t be top phones by the time the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus arrives, as the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are expected in September, and they will likely perform much better than the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.
However, these benchmark results are at least a significant upgrade from the Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus, which stands at 1,866 for single-core and 4,945 for multi-core, in Geekbench’s Android Benchmark Charts.
Now it’s not uncommon for Apple’s phones to outperform the top Android phones, but a previous leak suggested that the Samsung Galaxy S24 chipset could even beat the upcoming A17 Bionic that we expect to see in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
This leak added that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 would achieve this in part thanks to an extremely fast 3.7 GHz primary core. If this benchmark is to be believed then it is not, with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 listed here having a primary core at 3.3GHz along with three cores at 3.15GHz, two cores at 2.96GHz and two 2.27 GHz cores.
Things can get better
However, we can still see improvements even assuming this benchmark is accurate. For starters, this benchmark will use pre-release versions of both the chipset and the phone, so both can improve.
For another, it’s not clear if what we’re seeing here is the standard Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, or an overclocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, as Samsung got access to an overclocked version of the Gen 2 for the Galaxy S23 series.
We’d expect the same again with the S24 line, but as this is an early benchmark it’s possible overclocking hasn’t happened yet, especially as a 3.3GHz primary core would be a minor upgrade from the 3.2GHz Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but no better than the overclocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy.
It’s still unlikely that an overclocked version would hit the rumored 3.7GHz, but it could potentially hit 3.4GHz or maybe even 3.5GHz. All this is to say that we would take this benchmark with a grain of salt – and come what may, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus will certainly be powerful enough.
Aside from the chipset, this benchmark also mentions 8GB of RAM – which is equivalent to the Galaxy S23 Plus – and Android 14, which is exactly what we expect the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus to run.
Samsung will probably announce this phone in early 2024 – alongside the standard Galaxy S24 and the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra – so it’s still a bit of a wait.
As such we haven’t heard much about these phones so far, but from what we’ve heard the Galaxy S24 Plus might not be all that different from its predecessor, so this performance boost – even if it’s less than we’d hoped – should eventually could be one of the main reasons to upgrade.