Samsung yield issues reportedly forcing company to abandon Exynos for entire S25 lineup

Yield issues have haunted Samsung Foundry for years. What it basically means is that the company’s chip manufacturing factories are unable to make enough good chips that don’t need to be discarded. The costs are simply too high for a very poor result.Samsung recently recalled personnel from its plant in Taylor, Texas as its chip manufacturing continued to struggle. This followed reports of the company’s ambitions to develop and start using 1.4 nm chips by 2027.

Though Samsung used to release some of its phones with Snapdragon processors in the U.S., the rest of the world had to make do with Exynos most of the time. Samsung only switched all of its Ultra phones over to Snapdragon recently because of performance issues with Exynos.

But if the entire S25 lineup gets Snapdragon this year it will be like the S23 phones all over again: when Samsung had to abandon Exynos worldwide. According to reports, both from Revegnus and renowned analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Samsung plans to use its latest Exynos chips in phones coming after the S25 family. This includes the Galaxy S25 FE which is quite a while away seeing as the S24 FE only came out today.

If true, this is quite the blow to Samsung’s ambitions for Exynos. Then again, Exynos has been taking a beating for so long it’s probably not really news to the company. Apple, meanwhile, has begun trying to come up with viable in-house cellular modems so it can ditch Qualcomm.

Something it’s been having trouble with for years.