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Samsung's use of the Snapdragon 8 Elite AP on all Galaxy S25 units is a financial boon for Qualcomm

By Alan Friedman

Updated: Jan 28, 2025, 2:04 AM

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All of the phones in the Galaxy S25 series are powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy application processor (AP). The SoC is built by TSMC using its second-generation 3nm node (N3E). This is the first Snapdragon AP to be built on the 3nm node. Traditionally, Samsung uses a variant of its own Exynos chip to power the base Galaxy S and Galaxy S+ models everywhere but in the U.S., Canada, and China.

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But Samsung Foundry's poor yields at the 3nm node prevented Samsung from building enough Exynos 2500 APs in time to be included in the Galaxy S25 series. Instead, Samsung decided to equip all of the phones in the Galaxy S25 line with the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy. Because Samsung decided to go with Qualcomm's chipset on all Galaxy S25 units this year, the chip designer was able to sell Samsung an additional 12 million units of its flagship application processor running at a higher speed for Galaxy phones.

Those incremental Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy APs brought Qualcomm an extra revenue gain of $2 billion according to JP Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee who continues to give Qualcomm's stock an overweight rating. Based on the $2 billion Qualcomm took in for selling 12 million additional application processors to Samsung, the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy was priced at $166.67 for each chipset. While Qualcomm had a 70% share of the chipsets used on the Galaxy S24 line, its share of the Galaxy S25 series is 100%.

The extra $2 billion coming into Qualcomm's coffers will translate into an additional 63 cents for Qualcomm's 2025 earnings per share (EPS). That amount is 5% of the consensus Wall Street forecast for the fabless San Diego chip designer's 2025 EPS. Qualcomm introduced its own Oryon CPU cores in the Snapdragon 8 Elite AP replacing the CPU cores Qualcomm used to license from Arm Holdings. The "For Galaxy" custom chipsets have a peak CPU core performance speed of 4.47GHz compared to 4.32GHz on the regular variant.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy scored an impressive 3220 and 10223 on the single-core and multi-core Geekbench CPU benchmark test respectively, as we told you on Saturday. While the single-core fell just short of the 3457 scored by the A18 Pro powering the iPhone 16 Pro Max, the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy had a multi-core score that beat the powerful A18 Pro by 20%.

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Alan, an ardent smartphone enthusiast and a veteran writer at PhoneArena since 2009, has witnessed and chronicled the transformative years of mobile technology. Owning iconic phones from the original iPhone to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, he has seen smartphones evolve into a global phenomenon. Beyond smartphones, Alan has covered the emergence of tablets, smartwatches, and smart speakers.