Summary
Here atHow-To Geek, we don’t typically cover a lot of leaks or rumors because they can be, and often are, completely wrong or blown out of proportion. You never know when something’s actually true until it’s official. If this one is true, however, it might end up changing your summer purchase plans if you were waiting for this year’s new Samsung foldables.
There’s currently a lot of conflicting reports on what SoC the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 will use in the United States. Some reports say Samsung is throwing a Snapdragon chip into stateside units as usual, but a growing rumor is that the company might choose to put an in-house Exynos chip instead. This is something Samsung occasionally does for the phones it releases outside of the American continent, but not in the US, where it almost always sticks with Snapdragon for its flagship chips. Apparently, however, leaked firmware files for the Galaxy Z Flip 7 suggest that Samsung might launch the phone in the US with an Exynos 2500 SoC instead of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite.
The Exynos 2500 is not currently being used by any other Samsung phone, and would serve as the company’s newest flagship entry. We don’t know how it stacks up with the Snapdragon 8 Elite. But enthusiasts fear Exynos releases for a reason. Exynos chips tend to have subpar performance compared to Snapdragon SoCs, and when they’re stacked up in benchmarks as well as compared in real-life performance, Snapdragon chips tend to be the better option most of the time.
Samsung does use Exynos chips for its mid-range phones most of the time, but Snapdragon is usually the preferred option for flagship phones. So much so that Samsung has a long-standing partnership with Qualcomm where the company will give the Korean giant slightly higher-binned variants of its chips for exclusive use on Galaxy phones. The closest to an Exynos flagship experience you can get in the US is actually on Google’s Pixel phones—Google’s in-houseTensor chipsare manufactured by Samsung, though Google is looking to move to TSMC. Samsung is making efforts to make their own Exynos chips more competitive, but those haven’t materialized yet.
Packing the Galaxy Z Flip 7 with an Exynos chip in the US would be a curious move. The last time Samsung did an Exynos chip on a flagship phone in the US was with the Galaxy S6, all the way back in 2015. If this is true, I’ll reserve judgment on the chip until performance numbers are actually out, since Samsung could have greatly improved things. But I’m not holding my breath. Hopefully, this rumor is wrong.
