Why the Samsung Galaxy S25 could come with an Exynos 2500 chip after all
Samsung’s Galaxy S25 series could come with an Exynos 2500 chipset after all, according to a South Korean news report, which refutes claims that the company plans to exclusively use Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon mobile processor for its upcoming flagship smartphones. The company is said to be working on improving the yield of its chipset with just months to go before the successors to this year’s Galaxy S24 models are expected to be unveiled. Samsung has also been working on a new Exynos chip to power its upcoming Galaxy Watch 7 series.
According to a ZDNet Korea report (in Korean): Samsung is going “all out” to develop its own chipset for the Samsung Galaxy S25 series as part of a project dubbed ‘Solomon’. To do so, the company will need to improve the yield of its next-generation Exynos 2500 processor, which has reportedly remained low in recent months.
Citing industry sources, the publication said that Exynos 2500 yields were still below 20 percent in Q2 2024, up from single digits in the previous quarter. In order to begin mass production of its Exynos 2500 chip, Samsung needs to get yields to 60 percent (or higher) by September or October, the report said.
The Exynos 2500 isn’t the only high-end chip being developed by the South Korean tech company. According to the report, a next-generation Exynos W1000 chip is being developed as part of Samsung’s ‘Sapphire’ project, and is expected to succeed the dual-core Exynos W930 that powers the Galaxy Watch 6 model.
Earlier this month, Ming-Chi Kuo, a market analyst at TF International Securities, predicted that Samsung would equip all models in its Galaxy S25 series of smartphones with a Snapdragon chipset, due to the low yields of the Exynos 2500.
This year, the standard Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ models came with an Exynos 2400 chipset (except Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Taiwan, and the US), while the Galaxy S24 Ultra features a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip in all markets. It remains to be seen whether Samsung will equip all models in its Galaxy S25 series with Snapdragon chips — like the Galaxy S23 series, which launched last year.
