Update: It turns out that the Galaxy M52 5G has a Snapdragon 778G chipset under the hood instead of the Snapdragon 888. More details here.
Original story follows:
In what could be the most interesting bit of news this month, it looks like Samsung could be working on bringing this year's top-of-the-line Snapdragon processor to a mid-range phone. We've known for a few weeks that Samsung is working on a Galaxy M52 5G, and a device with a model number (SM-M526BR) that's likely to belong to the M52 5G has now shown up on the Geekbench database, seemingly with the Snapdragon 888 chipset under the hood.
Or, well, an as-yet-unannounced variant of the Snapdragon 888, as the processor specs shown in the phone's benchmark listing don't match those of the Snapdragon 888. Geekbench says the tested device had two quad-core clusters, while the Snapdragon 888 has a single ultra-performance core, a cluster of three high-performance cores, and another made up of four low-power cores.
A mysterious new Snapdragon 888 processor just for Samsung?
Yet, the codename for the chipset (lahaina) matches that of the Snapdragon 888, suggesting it's either a fake listing or an error caused the benchmark to report the wrong CPU information. Either way, it seems rather impossible that Samsung would bring the latest flagship Snapdragon chip to a mid-range phone, especially when chip shortages have already forced the company to delay the Galaxy S21 FE and outright cancel a 2021 Galaxy Note flagship.
For now, there's too little information to be completely sure about what Samsung is planning. Thankfully, we do have some believable new details about the Galaxy M52 5G at our hands, thanks to our friends over at GalaxyClub (who also spotted the benchmark listing on Geekbench). The M52 5G will reportedly be coming to some European markets with blue, black, and white color options. A launch in India is no doubt on the cards as well, though a time frame for when the phone will go official is currently unknown.
As for the M52 5G's spec sheet, we can expect it to share a lot of its hardware with the Galaxy A52 5G. In fact, barring the mysterious chipset, the M52 5G may well be exactly the same as the Galaxy A52 5G, just like the Galaxy M42 5G turned out to be a rebranded Galaxy A42 5G (but with newer software), though we will have to wait and see.
