Earlier this month, a report from South Korea claimed that Samsung was planning to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset for all the devices in the Galaxy S25 series. It was contrary to previous leaks which said that the company would exclusively use Qualcomm’s chipset for the Galaxy S25 Ultra globally. As for the Galaxy S25 Plus and the Galaxy S25, it would use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 for some countries and the in-house Exynos 2500 SoC for others. Now, a leak says otherwise but there’s a catch.
A screenshot shows a Samsung phone running Exynos 2500
On X (formerly Twitter), @theonecid, a popular tipster, has posted a screenshot from an app that shows the hardware and software details of a device. According to the image, the device on which the screenshot was taken comes from Samsung, features the s5e9955 chipset (it is the mode number of the Exynos 2500), a 10-core CPU, Xclipse 950 GPU (the GPU Samsung is expected to use in the next generation chipset), 14GB RAM, Android 15, and a display with 3,200 x 1,440 pixels resolution.
Since Samsung usually uses a flagship Exynos chipset in only flagship smartphones, the tipster says that this device is the Galaxy S25, and as the screenshot shows, it uses the Exynos 2500 SoC. Based on this assumption, he says that the Galaxy S25 will not use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset exclusively as a previous report had suggested.
But that doesn't mean it is a Galaxy S25 series phone
Well, folks at Android Authority made a keen observation. The System Name category in the image mentions the term ‘ERD.’ According to the publication, this term probably means ‘Exynos Reference Design.’ It means that this could be a device used for testing the Exynos 2500 SoC and might not necessarily be a Galaxy S25 series phone.
The story continues after the video…
If that’s true then it means that there’s still a possibility that the Galaxy S25 series smartphones will exclusively use Qualcomm’s upcoming chipset. Reportedly, Samsung wants to use “only the highest performance components” for the upcoming flagship phones to remove all doubts from people’s minds about their performance. That’s one of the reasons it is said to be planning to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 for the Galaxy S25 series instead of the Exynos 2500.
There's still hope
Apple has just launched the iPhone 16 series. These are the company's first AI-focused smartphones, featuring Apple Intelligence. If Samsung wants to compete strongly with the Cupertino-based tech giant on the AI front, it will have to use a more capable chipset for the Galaxy S25 series to offer more powerful AI features, and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is said to match or surpass the performance of iPhone 16’s A18 SoC.
At the moment, it is all just speculation. We haven’t had a single leak that offers a solid proof about the chipset in the Galaxy S25 series. With the next Galaxy Unpacked event at least five months away, we should start getting benchmark leaks in the next couple of months. Those leaks will give us a better idea about the upcoming phones' internals. Follow us on Telegram or WhatsApp to be the first to know about those leaks.
