Why next year’s premium smartphones will be less interesting

In the year 2023, high-end smartphones could greatly disappoint consumers. This is suggested by the first returns from Taiwanese factories, where the chipsets that will equip the best smartphones of 2023 are designed.

In Taiwan, chips from Qualcomm and Samsung are said to be, like every year, stronger than this year’s. But in 2023, they will be above all more energy intensive.

In fact, Exynos and Snapdragon chips are based on the ARM architecture. Roughly speaking, these platforms integrate low, medium, or high-performance cores. Logically the strongest hearts are the ones that use up the most energy. And if until last year the designers managed to improve everything, then we note excessive power consumption on the chips of the new generation. We have seen this for example with the Galaxy S22 whose autonomy is somewhat disappointing.

Unfortunately, the new chip architecture for the 2023 models seems to make matters worse. According to Taiwan comments, More efficient cores consume 10% more power. So we can expect to see the autonomy of premium smartphones decline in 2023. Unless…

Qualcomm go home?

According to media sources DiaryQualcomm will consider developing its chip architecture internally again to avoid this kind of inconvenience. The American giant worked in this way until the Snapdragon 865 chip.

Will this be enough to make up for this power consumption problem? not necessarily. So smartphone manufacturers will have to focus on other points: the battery, firstly, its capacity can be increased. They can also work on hardware/software improvement.

From race to performance

The problem facing chip manufacturers can also be solved in another way: by renewing processors less often. Manufacturers used to integrate a new chip every year with their smartphones. though, Two or even three or four year old processors still work well enough to meet our needs.

For several years, our uses have changed very little. While waiting for virtual reality (which we’ve been hearing about for 10 years) and augmented reality (which is starting to emerge), most of our use focuses on multimedia, the web, and a little bit of gaming and video in addition to photography.

If all of these uses evolved—and thus required technical improvements—we’ve come to a glass ceiling (except for photography, which continues to evolve). Therefore, we can think about renewing chips every two years, for example, in order to provide all consumers (depending on the date of renewal of their devices) high-performance models. And above all, it will not harm the planet.