Samsung Exynos 2500 with 10-Core CPU Debuts on Galaxy Z Flip7

On June 23, Samsung officially announced its latest flagship mobile processor, the Exynos 2500, via its official website. This new chip will debut on Samsung's upcoming foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Z Flip7, scheduled for launch in July.

According to Samsung's release, the Exynos 2500 is built on the company's second-generation 3nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) process technology, marking Samsung's first 3nm flagship smartphone chipset. The processor features a 10-core CPU arranged in a four-cluster design: one high-performance 3.3 GHz Cortex-X5 core, two 2.74 GHz Cortex-A725 performance cores, five 2.36 GHz Cortex-A725 cores, and two power-efficient 1.8 GHz Cortex-A520 cores.

The GPU is a custom Xclipse 950, co-developed with AMD, integrated with a 24K MAC Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and a dedicated Digital Signal Processor (DSP) AI engine. The chipset supports LPDDR5X memory, up to 320 million pixel camera sensors, 4K displays at 120Hz refresh rate, and UFS 4.0 storage. Additionally, it includes satellite communication capabilities.

The integrated 5G modem supports downlink speeds of up to 9.64 Gbps and uplink speeds of 2.55 Gbps on Sub-6GHz bands, as well as 12.1 Gbps downlink and 3.67 Gbps uplink on mmWave frequencies. LTE Cat.24 supports 3 Gbps downlink, while Cat.22 enables 4.22 Gbps uplink.

Samsung highlighted that the Exynos 2500's advanced 3nm GAA process combined with Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging (FOWLP) delivers improved power efficiency, enhanced thermal management, and a significantly thinner chip profile. The Xclipse 950 GPU has been upgraded from a 6WGP/4RB to an 8WGP/8RB dual shader engine architecture, featuring hardware-accelerated instance transformations that boost frame rates by 28% when ray tracing is enabled.

Benchmark tests from Geekbench 6.4 reveal that the Exynos 2500 achieves a single-core score of 2,356 points—a 17% improvement over earlier results—and a multi-core score of 8,076 points, up 6.7%. Previous Geekbench 6.4 scores had shown 2,012 single-core and 7,563 multi-core points.

For comparison, leading SoCs built on TSMC's 3nm process demonstrate higher performance: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 scores around 3,200 single-core and 10,400 multi-core points (Geekbench 6.2), MediaTek Dimensity 9400 reaches approximately 2,900 single-core and 9,200 multi-core points, Apple's A18 Pro scores about 3,400 single-core and 8,500 multi-core, and Xiaomi's Surge O1 chipset recorded 3,008 single-core and 9,509 multi-core points in Geekbench 6.2 tests.

These figures indicate that the Exynos 2500 currently lags behind other flagship SoCs based on TSMC's 3nm technology, potentially reflecting challenges in Samsung's 3nm fabrication process as well as its chipset architecture.

The Galaxy Z Flip7, Samsung's next foldable device launching in July, will be the first to feature the Exynos 2500 processor. It will offer a 3.6-inch cover display and a 6.8-inch internal screen (when unfolded), while also supporting versions powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform.