If you watch the Galaxy S22 and S22 Ultra disassembly video, you will see that the Ultra brought a new, bigger vapor chamber to cool its chipset. The small S22? It just had graphite pads (you can also watch this video for the S22). This year Samsung made the vapor chambers larger and even gave one to the lowly Galaxy S23.
Check out this animation posted by Ice Universe that shows the growth from last year’s S22 series to new models that were announced yesterday. You can see how much bigger the chambers on the Galaxy S23+ and S23 Ultra became.
If you prefer, you can have a look at these static images instead:
Last year, the Galaxy S22 couldn’t maintain peak performance for very long, though it was tuned well and degraded gracefully (more details in our review). This year the small S23 should last longer thanks to improved cooling and, of course, the more efficient TSMC-made Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset.
Additional performance gains are to be had from the faster RAM – LPDDR5X, which runs at 8.5Gbps, up from 6.4Gbps of the original non-X variant. The faster UFS 4.0 storage helps too, although be warned that the Galaxy S23 with 128GB storage uses the older UFS 3.1. The 256GB model does have the new storage chips and is a free upgrade during the pre-order period.
Check out our hands-on review with the Galaxy S23 series for more details.