Blame Snapdragon: An Exynos-powered Galaxy S27 Ultra is now more likely than ever

There’s no mystery that Samsung is in the late stages of working on the Galaxy S27 series. We’ve seen renders of the upcoming devices, highlighting all the design changes on the Galaxy S27 Ultra, or their lack in the base Galaxy S27 and the Plus. We’ve also seen plenty of evidence suggesting Samsung likely wouldn’t backtrack on launching a Pro model in 2027, which it skipped in the last generation. We’ve also heard of Samsung’s plans to use Exynos 2700 across the base, Plus, and Pro variants of the Galaxy S27. However, while the Ultra was initially believed to be excluded from this plan, Samsung may have to equip the Galaxy S27 Ultra with its upcoming Exynos chip.

Samsung’s last Galaxy Ultra with an Exynos chip was the Galaxy S22 Ultra, five generations prior. Heating issues, relatively lower performance than its Snapdragon counterparts, and a generally poorer reputation have forced Samsung to stick with only Qualcomm chips for its highest-tier devices. Naturally, we had every reason to believe Samsung would stick with the newly launched Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 for the Galaxy S27 Ultra.

But a recent report from the Korean business news outlet Seoul Economic Daily indicates that Qualcomm’s latest chips have failed to meet Samsung’s performance requirements. The report says that while Samsung has been testing the chipset for over a month, it has encountered extreme heating and throttling issues. Throttling is when a component’s performance is automatically reduced to limit heat produced.

As a result, Samsung asked Qualcomm to fix the issues, but the optimizations still don’t meet Samsung’s demands. This leaves Samsung in a fix, as the company planned to finalize component design by mid-October to stay on track to kick off mass production by the end of the year.

The two are reportedly still optimizing the pipelines and re-verifying results to stay on schedule. The report further adds that if Qualcomm and Samsung manage to limit heat produced by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, they could continue with the initial plan of using the chip on the Galaxy S27 Ultra. However, if that isn’t realized, Samsung might have to use Exynos on the Galaxy S27 Ultra. It’s unclear whether Samsung will be forced to drop Snapdragon entirely or will still use it to power Ultra devices in certain regions.

Will Exynos 2700 be able to deliver the same or similar performance as Qualcomm’s Extreme chip? That’s time to tell, but a few factors favor Samsung. Last year, it upgraded the flagship Exynos 2600 to a 2nm process and added a physical heat sink to reduce heat generation. On paper, the Exynos 2600 even felt more capable than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but that did not translate to higher real-world performance.

While Samsung has yet to share details officially, early leaks suggest the chip could outperform its high-end rival from Qualcomm, though we would like to test it ourselves before jumping to conclusions. Meanwhile, Samsung is also expected to manufacture a share of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips for Qualcomm, though those wouldn’t qualify for the top-tier performance that the Galaxy S27 Ultra would command.