On Wednesday, Samsung confirmed that the Galaxy S25 range will be using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite across all models, regardless of the region. That’s a break from the recent past where Samsung has used a mix of Qualcomm and its own Exynos chipsets depending on the region.
However, it looks like it won’t be a permanent one, with the upcoming foldable Galaxy Z Flip 7 tipped to use the Exynos 2500 instead. If that’s true, we could be looking at very different performance levels, as a leaker has revealed alleged specs for the new chipset, and it looks rather different to Qualcomm’s latest.
According to @Jukanlosreve on X, the Exynos 2500 will be a somewhat unusual 10-core CPU with a 1+2+5+2 layout. That means it’ll have a Cortex-X925 main core clocked at 3.3GHz, seven Cortex-A725 cores (two clocked at 2.75GHz and five at 2.36GHz) and two little Cortex-A520 cores running at 1.8GHz.
Exynos 2500 specifications for the Z Flip 73.3GHz ARM Cortex-X925 1core2.75GHz ARM Cortex-A725 2core2.36GHz ARM Cortex-A725 5core1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A520 2coreL3 Cache 16MB 9.6Gbps 16bit Quad-Channel LPDDR5X Memory UFS4.x STORAGE 1.3GHz Samsung Xclipse 950 GPU (AMD…January 25, 2025
This is interesting, as both Qualcomm and MediaTek have abandoned little cores entirely, with only Google’s Tensor chipset maintaining them for the Pixel 9 family of smartphones. For comparison, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite only has eight cores, but they’re faster with two main cores running at 4.3GHz and six performance cores clocked at up to 3.53GHz.
On the graphics front, @jukanlosreve says the chip will be powered by a 1.3GHz Xclipse 950 GPU with eight workgroup processors. It will use AMD’s RDNA 3.5 architecture — a step up from the RDNA 3 used by its predecessor.
With plenty of time for refinement ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7’s expected summer release, we don’t know exactly what this will mean in terms of performance, but we got an early look when the same leaker revealed preliminary Exynos 2500 benchmarks for the chipset last month. In short, it’s a little slower than the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but probably not enough for most users to tell the difference in day-to-day use:
| Phones | Single Core | Multicore |
|---|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Elite | 3,160 | 9,941 |
| Exynos 2500 | 2,358 | 8,211 |
| Apple A18 Pro | 3,400 | 8,341 |
Interestingly, when @jukanlosreve published those benchmarks, they were said to be associated with a Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus prototype. We now know that all S25 retail models use Qualcomm chips, and this is said to be because Samsung couldn’t manufacture enough Exynos 2500 chips to feed demand.
It could be that the company has improved the production process since then, or it might be that a smaller yield doesn’t matter, as foldables remain a niche that still don’t sell in significant volumes. After all, we recently heard that Samsung was slashing Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Flip 7 production by nearly 40%.
