So this year, Samsung is expected to pack the Snapdragon 8 Elite AP into all of its Galaxy S25 series phones. It’s hard to see how a price hike can be avoided this year. If there is some good news that will come out of this, the Snapdragon 8 Elite AP packs a powerful punch with two Prime Cores running at a clock speed of 4.32GHz and six Performance Cores running as fast as 3.53GHz. There are no efficiency cores. MediaTek successfully did away with efficiency cores with the Dimensity 9300 and Dimensity 9400 so there is some precedent here.
Samsung will also have to make a tough decision on the pricing for the Galaxy S26 series in 2026 if the Exynos 2600 runs into the same problem. Samsung doesn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of needing TSMC to build an Exynos chipset but truthfully, Samsung Foundry has had problems with low yields for some time now. You might recall that low yields for Samsung Foundry’s 4nm node forced Qualcomm to move production of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to TSMC where it was slightly revised and given the new moniker of Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.
