Samsung has seemingly always had big intentions for its Exynos chips. Even back in the days when the Snapdragon models of its flagship smartphones were the clear winners, Samsung never hesitated to choke most of us outside North America with devices that ran on subpar SoCs.
However, in recent years, especially with the Exynos 2400, Samsung has managed to close the gap significantly. The Exynos 2500 in the upcoming S25 family was expected to reduce the difference even further, but it seems that won’t happen. This might be an exclusively Snapdragon set of smartphones.
Samsung’s Foundry Is Struggling With Producing Enough Exynos 2500 Chips For Its Next Major Release
Here’s a little crash course on chip production. Making smartphone chips is an extremely complex process. When a company says that it wants to make a chip with certain specifications, you need to understand that if it intends to make 100 chips of that kind, it might end up having to make 120, because 20 that were produced simply don’t meet the necessary specs. This quality control process is referred to as chip binning.
In Samsung’s case, the Exynos 2500 is expected to be its first smartphone chip running on a 3nm process, which further complicates things. This has led to Samsung’s foundry reportedly dealing with a low yield of Exynos 2500 chips, according to Business Korea. Obviously, if the company wants the Exynos 2500 to be a part of Galaxy S25 models across the globe, it’ll need to know it can make enough. Right now, it seems that it can’t.
This Means The Galaxy S25 Series Could Potentially Be Snapdragon-Only Across The Board
If Samsung can’t get enough Exynos chips to put in some of its S25 smartphones, what other options does the company really have? They did make a switch to MediaTek for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 series and rumors have suggested earlier this year that the company could be considering MediaTek, but at this point, that seems unlikely.
Samsung had an S lineup that was Snapdragon-only back in 2023 so it’s not beyond comprehension that they might simply do the same thing this time around. The MediaTek Dimensity 9400 will be available for the taking at that point, but the Qualcomm name does a lot more for power users than MediaTek—even if they offer essentially the same power these days.
Nobody Is Complaining Though; Samsung and Qualcomm Have Good Synergy
I don’t think this is particularly a thing of concern for consumers. Samsung’s Exynos chips have yet to reach a point where they’re considered superior to Qualcomm’s Snapdragons, so users who normally would have had to get an Exynos chip will consider this to be an upgrade.
Plus, you can’t hate on the partnership that Qualcomm and Samsung have built together over the years. Qualcomm could potentially produce a “For Galaxy” model of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 as they did with previous flagship Snapdragon chips, which could mean better performance than the rest of the flagship world gets.
