Samsung Galaxy: Top chip only for leading markets
While Samsung’s coming Galaxy smartphones in “leading markets” such as the United States will continue to be equipped with high-end Qualcomm chips, European users have to be satisfied with the presumably inferior Exynos processors.
Two-class society at smartphone hardware
Samsung actually wanted to equip the Galaxy S25 with his own Exynos 2500 chip. However, due to problems, the plans and installed the Snapdragon 8 Elite from Qualcomm were postponed. Now the Koreans are apparently returning to the in-house processors in their upcoming smartphone generations. How Sammobile reports, the company plans to equip its foldable smartphones with the Exynos 2500 with the Galaxy Z Flip 7. However, this should not be the case everywhere in the world.
The premium markets of North America and China are likely to continue to receive the faster Qualcomm chips. However, Europe is not part of this selected group. Accordingly, German users must also be satisfied with the in-house Exynos processors who are traditionally slower than their Qualcomm counter.
Technical details of the new Exynos chip
The new Exynos 2500 should come up with a 10-core structure. A single Cortex X-5 CPU core serves as the heart, which clocks with 3.2 to 3.3 GHz. This is supplemented by further Cortex-A725 and Cortex-A520 cores. In comparison, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is to be used in the “leading markets”, is expected to achieve higher performance values.
Economic reasons for the change of strategy
Among other things, the change to Exynos has economic reasons. The two Samsung business areas System LSI and Foundry recorded losses of about a trillion Korean won each in the first quarter (around 6.1 billion euros). By using its own chips, Samsung wants to secure internal demand and improve the utilization of the production facilities.
Samsung had already released his smartphones with different chips for different markets in the past. So this strategy is nothing fundamentally new. The Exynos processors were often criticized to be less energy-efficient and suffer from strong heat development. With the Galaxy S22 series, these problems even led to a class action lawsuit in South Korea, since the devices had to reduce performance when used intensively.
Different markets, different strategies
Samsung apparently uses Europe and other markets as a kind of test field to verify the performance of its Exynos chips. For consumers, this strategy means that you may receive devices with less performance and energy efficiency for the same prices as customers in other regions. It remains to be seen whether Samsung will compensate for these differences from other advantages. In the past, however, this was not the case.
Realistically speaking, the majority of the users should hardly notice the differences in the chips. For everyday applications, the Exynos 2500 should also deliver more than enough performance. The Snapdragon 8 Elite will only be able to play its advantages at extremely high requirements. How big the difference is ultimately can only be said after corresponding tests. The Galaxy Z Flip 7 is likely to be presented at the upcoming unpacked event in summer.
