Samsung has been using custom, high-end Snapdragon chips in its Galaxy S Ultra series phones over the past couple of years, and the company will likely follow the pattern next year. The Galaxy S25 Ultra was expected to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 For Galaxy chip next year, but a new report says the chip will have a completely different name.
Qualcomm's next flagship chip could be called Snapdragon 8 Elite
The Snapdragon chip spotted on the Galaxy S25 Ultra could be called the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This information comes from a teaser that Xiaomi posted regarding its upcoming high-end phone. On Weibo, the Chinese firm posted an image of a phone's silhouette and mentioned Xiaomi 15 on top of the image. It has the name Snapdragon 8 Elite, likely the final name of Qualcomm's next flagship mobile processor.
This information seems believable, as Qualcomm is bringing its custom Oryon CPU cores for the first time with its next flagship chip. These are the same CPU cores that it developed after acquiring Nuvia, and they have already been used in the Snapdragon X Elite chip that was launched a few months ago for ARM-based Windows laptops. The company could bring the same Elite branding from its current flagship laptop chip to its next flagship smartphone processor.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite, featuring Oryon CPU cores and TSMC's 3nm fabrication process, matches the iPhone 16 Pro Max's A18 Pro chip in the single-core CPU benchmark and exceeds Apple's chip in the multi-core CPU benchmark. Even the Adreno 830 GPU inside the chip is said to be over 50% more powerful than the one inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Overall, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is expected to bring massive performance gains with next-generation flagship Android phones like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The only thing that remains to be seen is its stability under sustained loads and power efficiency. It will be unveiled at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 next month.
It is still unclear if Samsung will use the Exynos 2500 chip in the Galaxy S25 and the Galaxy S25+ or equip them with the Snapdragon 8 Elite worldwide.
