As the excitement around Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S25 release, the community was ready for the South Korean company to go all-in on Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and offer every S25, S25+ and S25 Ultra with the advanced system-on-chip. Unfortunately, the latest benchmarking results may leave many in Europe frustrated.
The European variant of the Galaxy S25+ has shown up on the popular benchmarking site Geekbench. This should not be a surprise; most smartphones, tablets, and laptops will go through online testing and appear on these sites. What will come as a surprise is the benchmarking hardware report.
Rather than Qualcomm’s recently released Snapdragon 8 Elite, the S25+ is running Samsung’s in-house Exynos 2500 chipset.
Splitting The Galaxy S25 Specs
While the benchmarking is for an unreleased handest and the specifications could change, given the launch is expected in around two months, it is likely this represents release hardware—although the software will still be going through a process of optimisation to find more performance and efficiencies. The same applies to the Galaxy S models with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, yet these chipsets outperform the Exynos specced models.
With the current Galaxy S24 handsets split between the two flavors of silicon, it has been clear that the Snapdragon handsets offered more power efficiency with improved graphical performance… key reasons why the community was looking forward to the unification of Snapdragon 8 Elite across the range.
The Galaxy S25 And Galaxy AI
The presumptively named Galaxy Unpacked launch event in January should also see 2025’s first major update to Galaxy AI. While a portion of the AI suite is server based, a significant component runs on the handset, which puts a premium on performance and efficiency. Samsung took an early lead in generative AI on smartphones with last year’s Galaxy S24 family, and the S25 cohort is expected to extend that reach. The extra performance in the Snapdragon 8 Elite compared to the Eynosys 2500 may be more apparent on this cutting edge than any other in the Galaxy’s back catalogue.
Now read more about Samsung’s plan to release a Galaxy S25 with a slim form factor…
