Fiasco on takeoff: Samsung Galaxy S25 smartphone chipset fails performance tests

Qualcomm promised significant improvements in the performance of the central and graphics processor, but the results of the first tests were disappointing.

Samsung's new Galaxy S25 smartphone line received a unique customized Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, which showed poor performance in early Geekbench benchmark tests. This was noticed by Notebookcheck.

In its press release, Samsung announced that together with Qualcomm, it has developed a version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite (SM8750-AC) specifically for the Galaxy S25 series, which is the world's most powerful and fastest mobile system on a chip. It is equipped with the most powerful and fastest second-generation Qualcomm Oryon processor, the latest Qualcomm Adreno graphics processor, and the innovative Qualcomm Hexagon neural processor.

The chipset has been tuned for better image quality and power consumption on the Galaxy S25 smartphones. It also works more harmoniously with Samsung's camera hardware, although details are not disclosed. Samsung adds that the SM8750-AC has an overclocked neural processor, but neither Samsung nor Qualcomm have shared details in this area.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy is equipped with Prime CPU cores that are 150 MHz faster than the SM8750-AB and SM8750-3-AB. Qualcomm also allows its Adreno 830 GPU to run 9% faster in the SM8750-AC than in the SM8750-AB or SM8750-3-AB, thanks to a 100MHz boost to 1200MHz.

However, early benchmarks don't reflect the claimed gains. In fact, only one run beats the highest single-core score NotebookCheck achieved with the stock Snapdragon 8 Elite, and that's by just 2%. The 100MHz to 1200MHz clock speed on the new Adreno 830 GPU allows it to achieve a more than 6% advantage in Geekbench 6.3 Vulkan tests, but that's still less than promised.

Samsung will start shipping pre-ordered Galaxy S25 smartphones in early February. Then, owners will be able to conduct more independent performance tests and see if the custom Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy can outpace the stock version.