The Galaxy S25 Edge is set to be one of Samsung’s most unusual phones to launch in recent times. It defies Samsung’s traditional design philosophy, where few factors distinguish phones from one another, irrespective of their price range. It is also set to be one of the lightest flagships Samsung has made in several years without compromising on aesthetics.
More importantly, the Galaxy S25 Edge is not an FE equivalent that sits beneath the newly announced S25 series. It belongs in the series and a recent leak, which reveals its processor, vouches for that. However, there is something concerning about it too.
No cutbacks on power
The Galaxy S25 Edge was recently listed on the popular CPU benchmarking platform, Geekbench (via Notebookcheck). Based on the listing, the slim phone will pack a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset inside.
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The clock speeds in the Geekbench listing indicate that the phone gets the same overclocked version of the chipset as others in the latest S series, and also attests that the S25 Edge in fact uses the 8-core variant instead of the slightly less powerful 7-core one that is rumored to power some other slim phones, such as the upcoming Oppo Find N5 or the OnePlus Open 2.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite not only uses a more sophisticated architecture compared to the last generation chip, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but also offers a far better performance. While this should ensure the Galaxy S25 Edge will be no inferior to other devices in its category — and, presumably, its price bracket, the chip could lead to some issues.
Why the chipset has me worried
Qualcomm deploys the same Oryon cores on the Snapdragon 8 Elite that it previously used for the Snapdragon X Elite — a chip intended for laptops, not mobile devices. That means the mobile silicon is powerful enough to cater to almost any Android system process or application. The overclocked “For Galaxy” variant is especially geared for slightly better CPU performance and AI processing and should hold well against the growing needs of on-device AI over the coming years.
A downside of this, however, is the excessive heat generation, which, despite the high power, can lead to thermal throttling. Throttling is a scenario when silicon-level algorithms prevent the chips from performing at maximum capability to prevent them from heating too much and burning out.
While certain brands, such as OnePlus, go the extra length to use specialized hardware — predominantly vapor cooling chambers — to reduce heat build up inside the phone’s body, Samsung hasn’t ever been too bullish on this aspect. Although the Galaxy S25 series has a vapor chamber, it is not extensive as we see on the OnePlus 13 — or some other less popular Android flagship of Chinese origin.
We see the result in our Galaxy S25 Ultra review, where the phone, despite being stocked with a more powerful chipset, performs poorly in synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench compared to the OnePlus 13.
The score we see in the leak are much lower, and can be a cause for concern for two reasons. First, a recent leak points the vapor chamber inside the Galaxy S25 Edge will be smaller than what we see on the Ultra, indicating lower performance. Secondly, the phone is intended to be slimmer than the Galaxy S25 series, which further limits the physical space that the heat generated inside it gets to dissipate to the cooler regions, and these could make things worse.
All hope’s not lost
There is still some hope that Samsung optimizes the design to keep the Galaxy S25 Edge’s temperatures under control without smothering the beast, especially since the leak corresponds to a pre-release unit, leading to some errors. Besides that, Geekbench listings are not 100% reliable, and can be spoofed if you know how to tinker with Android’s source code.
It’s best to assume we will know for sure when the phone launches in the coming months. Another rumor suggests the Galaxy S25 Edge will launch in Q2 2025, which could be any month from April, May, or June. We will have to wait a few more weeks — or even months — to know the launch date with certainty.
