Samsung Exynos 2500 “Dream Chip” specifications may have leaked

Samsung revealed its latest flagship smartphones for this year last week. The Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+, and Galaxy S24 Ultra are available for pre-order in several countries around the world, but have not yet reached customers. The performance and efficiency of the Exynos 2400 have not been extensively tested, but some information about the Exynos 2500 processor has already been leaked.

The Exynos 2500 can power the Galaxy S25 in most countries and could be Samsung's first really good Exynos chipset in years.

Exynos 2500 specifications revealed on ARM

The Exynos 2500 (tentative name) will likely power at least some units in the Galaxy S25 series. Snitching @OreXda claimed The Exynos 2500 will use a 10-core CPU like the Exynos 2400, but it will use Samsung's more advanced chip manufacturing process and CPU cores coming from ARM. Apparently, the Exynos 2500 will be the first chip to use Samsung Foundry's 3nm (3nm GAP/SF3) process. It is said to be better than TSMC's 3nm process in terms of area and efficiency. The Exynos 2500 will reportedly use one Cortex-X5 CPU core clocked at 3.2 GHz or higher, three Cortex-A720 CPU cores clocked at 2.3 GHz or higher, three Cortex-A720 CPU cores, and four Cortex-A720 CPU cores -A530.

Some reports claim ARM's upcoming Blackhawk CPU core (Cortex-X5) will outperform Apple's latest custom CPU cores in terms of single-core performance. ARM has already teased the Blackhawk core CPU core (Cortex-X5), the Chaberton performance CPU core (Cortex-A730), and the Hayes power efficiency CPU core (Cortex-A530) in mid-2023. If this information is correct , Samsung's Exynos 2500 chipset, equipped with upcoming ARM CPU cores, could beat Apple in terms of performance for the first time in more than a decade. But it remains to be seen how it performs in terms of efficiency.

The Exynos 2500 could feature AMD's RDNA-based Xlipse 950 GPU, and is expected to offer better performance. The AMD RDNA3-based Xclipse 940 GPU inside the Exynos 2400 actually outperforms the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in ray tracing performance.

Diary: We expect the Exynos 2500 to be announced before the end of this year, and the chipset will be ready in early 2025 for the launch of the Galaxy S25 series. The Exynos 2400 appears to fare much better in terms of performance and efficiency compared to previous generation Exynos chips and is almost on par with the latest flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor. So, it looks like Exynos is finally seeing the transformation everyone wanted.

The combination of Samsung Foundry's 3nm process, Samsung's enhanced optimization, and ARM's upcoming powerful Blackhawk CPU cores could give the Exynos 2500 a big boost, and it could truly turn out to be the South Korean company's “dream chip.” Samsung could also choose to rebrand its Exynos processor lineup to leave the damaged brand image behind.