Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra
Ewan Spence
Samsung will kick off a year of smartphone launches with the flagship Galaxy S26 Ultra in early 2026. It will set the tone for specifications, software, and services for the market to follow throughout the year. Yet the Samsung community want to hear the answer to one question about the flagship.
Exynos or Snapdragon?
The Galaxy S26 Ultra Engine
This week, regulatory filings offered an answer to that question, and it’s one the community will welcome. The details come from the ever-reliable FCC certification, which is required before a product launch in the United States.
Two model numbers are listed: SM-S948B and SM-S948U, which align with Samsung’s naming conventions and prior leaked details for the S26 Ultra. The “U” suffix denotes a carrier-specific model sold in the US, while the “B” version is the unlocked version sold globally.
Both variants are listed as using SM8850; which matches the model number of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. And with that, the question of the Galaxy S26 Ultra running the homegrown Exynos chipset, or the external Snapdragon chipset. While there may be separate arrangements in other territories, the broad question has been answered.
The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra will be running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
The Power Of The Galaxy S26 Ultra
The perception remains that the Snapdragon chipset is the better choice for previous Galaxy S handsets compared with the Exynos models. Snapdragon is regarded as offering higher performance and better thermal performance than Exynos. The margins are small, though, and the Exynos is more efficient, offering longer battery life. These margins are small and shrinking with each iteration.
Online benchmarking spotted in early November by the PhoneArena team suggested that the gap has closed, with the latest Exynos 2600 posting a single-core rating of 3,455 against the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s 2,885. However, the winner was reversed on multi-core performance, with Exynos at 11,621 and Snapdragon at 12,396.
Nevertheless, the perception remains. And the perception that the S26 Ultra will offer the absolute best specs possible should also remain.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra And Galaxy AI
Outright performance never tells the whole story. With mobile AI adoption set to rise, there will be a push in 2026 to improve AI results and the ecosystem. Local data processing will gain prominence, requiring not only raw performance but also hard-coded silicon to support the AI software. How the respective chipsets perform with AI is not yet clear to the public.
It may be that the Snapdragon wins in performance, and the Exynos wins out as a lower-cost line in the bill of materials. It’s worth noting that the Exynos 2600 is expected to appear in the Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26+, but it is not yet known whether these two S26 models will be exclusively Exynos.
When To Expect The Galaxy S26 Ultra
Samsung is expected to host a Galaxy Unpacked event in late January 2026, at which the Galaxy S26, Galaxy S26+, and Galaxy S26 Ultra are expected to be launched.
Now read why an early launch of the Galaxy S26 Ultra will benefit Samsung…
