It probably won’t be too surprising to learn that the Samsung Galaxy S25 series — the entire series — is powered by Qualcomm’s premium Snapdragon 8 Elite silicon this year — the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, to be exact. Whether you’re a US or global consumer buying a baseline or Ultra model, there’s no Samsung Exynos chip in sight, though the company remains tight-lipped on the exact reason. The good news for us is that this ensures battery, feature, and performance parity across the field, but for Samsung, it looks like another chipset setback.
Anyone familiar with the long-running Samsung Exynos versus Qualcomm Snapdragon saga will know that the race is sometimes close and other times not so much, but in recent years, Qualcomm has gradually been gaining the upper hand. As far back as 2022, both the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Exynos 2200 inside the Galaxy S22 ran overly hot, owing to yield problems at Samsung Foundries and its 4nm node, resulting in the GOS throttling controversy. Qualcomm addressed this issue by switching to TSMC for an 8 Plus Gen 1 refresh, the 8 Gen 2, and all of its subsequent chips, but Samsung remained trapped with its underperforming node. As a result, the Galaxy S23 series went all in on Snapdragon for the first time, while Samsung claimed it was “reorganizing” its chip business model.