With the Samsung Galaxy S25 now likely just four months away, it would appear that it's time to start talking about the Samsung Galaxy S26 – and it's being tipped to offer some significant performance gains when it launches early in 2026.
Flagship phones always get faster year-on-year of course, but a new report from PhoneArena based on a source in China suggests we're looking at a substantial jump forward in power, thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset.
We haven't yet seen the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset – it's expected to break cover next month – but its successor will apparently come with some next-generation 3-nanometer technology (better performance with greater power efficiency, essentially).
The highest clock speeds (a measure of calculation speed) on this new chipset will apparently hit 5GHz, according to this source. The current Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 maxes out at 3.4GHz, so that would be a big jump across two years.
Chips with everything
Yesterday we saw some leaked benchmark scores suggesting the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra – with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 from Qualcomm inside – could have enough oomph to beat the iPhone 16 Pro Max in terms of raw power.
There is always a complication with Samsung's flagship phones, though, in that some years it equips some models with Qualcomm chips and some models with its own Exynos chips, depending on where in the world they're sold.
That's what happened with the Samsung Galaxy S24 and the Galaxy S24 Plus, though not the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. We'll have to wait and see what the mix is with the Galaxy S25, which may then give us some clues about the Galaxy S26.
You could argue that all this top-level power isn't really necessary for day-to-day phone use, but there are two scenarios where it can make a noticeable difference: in playing demanding games on your mobile, and in tapping up generative AI tools – and those games and tools are only likely to get more demanding between now and 2026.
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