It’s far later into 2025 than Samsung likely hoped for, but its Exynos 2500 chipset is finally official, just ahead of next month’s rumored Unpacked.
The Exynos 2500 is Samsung’s first to be built on a 3nm GAA node, a big upgrade over the 4nm process used on the Exynos 2400. As such, it should bring some pretty major efficiency improvements over its direct predecessor. That should be good news for Samsung’s foundry business, which has found itself in some pretty poor comparisons with TSMC over the past few years. Samsung says the Exynos 2500 also relies on fan-out wafer-level packaging, or FOWLP, to deliver a slimmer chipset and “enhanced heat dissipation.”
It’s not quite up to par with the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s raw horsepower, but the Exynos 2500 still sounds worthy of its flagship status. It’s rocking a 1+7+2 CPU core arrangement, complete with Arm’s latest Cortex-X925 (née Cortex-X5, which Samsung still uses in its footnotes) rated at 3.3GHz. Its Cortex-A725 performance cores are divided into two groups — two cores clocked at 2.74GHz, five clocked at 2.36GHz — while its two efficiency cores are 1.8GHz Cortex-A520s. Samsung says the move to Arm’s Cortex-X5 alone should deliver 15 percent improvements over the Exynos 2400 in “big-core performance.”
Elsewhere, the 4th-gen Xclipse 950 GPU includes support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, along with repeated support for 4K video output at 120FPS. Its NPU — always a talking point for chipset companies these days — is 39 percent faster at processing on-device AI applications, something crucial to practically every Samsung smartphone right now. Its camera capabilities, however, appear unchanged from the Exynos 2400; like last-gen, we’re looking at 320MP sensor support and 8K30 video recording.
Perhaps most curious — especially when talking about a new Samsung chip — is its modem. Samsung’s being coy about what modem it’s using, delivering a list of specs without specifically referring to anything by name. The company’s Exynos 5400 modem, previously found in last year’s Pixel 9 series, is a near-match on these listed specs, but with slower FR1 and FR2 maximum download speeds.
While flagship Exynos chips typically don’t leave much of an impact on North America, that could change in just a short couple of weeks. The Galaxy Z Flip 7 is rumored to be running on the Exynos 2500 globally, and with today’s announcement, the stars are finally starting to align. Samsung’s next foldables are coming on July 9th, and you can reserve your phone without obligations using the link above to receive a $50 credit if and when you pre-order.
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