If recent history is a guide, Samsung will release its upcoming Galaxy S25 smartphones in the first few months of next year, with the last four models arriving in January or February.
There are already plenty of Samsung Galaxy S25 leaks and rumors to get your teeth into, but a new report highlights an interesting tidbit about its successor. Phone Arena cites a subscriber-only post from a leaker in China, claiming that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset set to power 2026’s flagship smartphones will be getting a substantial power boost over what’s on the table now.
Before we get into the specifics, a quick health warning about social media smartphone leaks. While they have frequently proven to be correct in the past, the accuracy of any individual leak can’t be relied on — and that’s doubly true when the poster in question doesn’t have a strong track record to consult. The leaker in question here — The Undead on Weibo — has an “unknown” track record, Phone Arena concedes, so take the following with a pinch of salt.
With that out the way, the post explains that the 3nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5’s efficiency cores will hit 4GHz, with the performance cores reaching as high as 5GHz.
While we’re yet to see what speeds Qualcomm will reveal in this year’s chip (we’re supposedly looking at around 4GHz), we do know that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy which powers the Samsung Galaxy S24 has core speeds of between 2.2GHz and 3.39GHz, so that would be an enormous jump in just two years.
Again, it’s probably best to treat this with some skepticism for now. Even if the (still theoretical) chipset is capable of hitting these speeds, it may not be practical when enclosed inside smartphones. There’s limited space for cooling, even with the efficiency improvements the 3nm manufacturing process should bring.
The elephant in the room is that, for many people, smartphones are more than fast enough already, and a near-50% speed boost might seem like extreme overkill. There are two areas where more speed is always welcome, however: high-end mobile gaming and on-device AI. With all smartphone makers betting big on the latter, more speed will certainly be welcome for those pushing cutting-edge generative AI features in the next few years.
Before the Samsung Galaxy S26, of course, we’ve for the Galaxy S25 to look forward to. Leaked benchmarks suggest around a 25-30% improvement in terms of speed, with more RAM and big improvements to the camera on the S25 Ultra model.