Samsung is gearing up to announce its Galaxy S25 series, which will be sometime in January 2025. The base model of Galaxy S25, which bears the model number “SM-S931N” (probably for Korea), has recently surfaced on Geekbench, revealing parts of its hardware. It is powered by a custom “Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy” chip which has a higher clock speed of 4.47 GHz when compared to the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite’s 4.32 GHz. We have seen this chipset in Samsung high-end smartphones. The tested device also has 12GB of RAM.

Base Galaxy S25 with Snapdragon 8 Elite Spotted on Geekbench, Tipster Confirms Entire Series Will Use It

Those specs were certainly promising, but the performance result was a bit disappointing. In single-core and multi-core tests, the Galaxy S25 respectively came in only 2481 and 8658 points lower than the rest of the Snapdragon 8 Elite devices like the OnePlus 13 and iQOO 13 which scored over 3100 and 10,000 points. It begs the question of whether the smaller cooling solution found in the base model or Samsung’s pursuit of efficiency as opposed to raw performance could be behind these results.

Samsung’s custom chipsets have historically scored lower than their standard Snapdragon counterparts, so it’s still vaguely mysterious why performance isn’t as aggressively high here, but it could be simply due to some optimizations for efficiency. On top of that, tipster Ice Universe also claimed that the Snapdragon 8 Elite will be powering the so-called Galaxy S25 series in full and not just for the Korean variant. It would be in line with what Samsung did for the Galaxy S23 lineup.

Samsung has traditionally released its flagship phones with Snapdragon and Exynos chipsets for different regional markets, but that’s changing for the S25 series. According to Ice Universe, the Galaxy S25 series is said to use only Snapdragon 8 Elite even if it is excluded from Exynos 2500. That would be a result of manufacturing issues with Samsung’s Exynos chips.

Currently only yielding around 20%, Samsung Foundry’s 3nm process has placed the Exynos 2500 in open-beta, preventing any economically reasonable completion. TSMC’s 3nm process used for Snapdragon chips has an over 80% die yield rate by contrast.

With these production concerns, Samsung might go with a Galaxy S25 series entirely powered by Snapdragon. Samsung is also considering outsourcing Exynos production to TSMC, which would increase the attractiveness of the Galaxy S25. It’s all speculation for now, but a more streamlined flagship approach could mean a steadier and more efficient flagship experience when the series arrives in January 2025.