Recent rumors have it that the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will come equipped with the same battery and charging hardware as the Galaxy S24 Ultra, and while tipsters remain in agreement over that claim, we’re now hearing that the upcoming phone could still boast better battery life than its predecessor.
According to a Vietnam-based Discord leaker (via X and PhoneArena), Qualcomm’s as-yet-unreleased Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset – which is expected to power the Galaxy S25 Ultra and more of the best Android phones in 2025 – will boast vastly improved GPU energy efficiency over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
In theory, this should result in better battery performance for the Galaxy S25 Ultra, even if both devices share the same battery hardware (specifically a 5,000mAh battery and 45W wired charging capabilities).
“The CPU efficiency improvement [of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4] is in the single digit percentage, but the GPU improvement is huge,” leaker @negativeonehero writes on X. “[MediaTek] D9300 peak at half the power is possible.” In layman’s terms, this means that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 could be capable of delivering peak MediaTek Dimensity 9300 GPU performance at half the power consumption. Yikes.
This is, of course, positive news for prospective Galaxy S25 Ultra buyers, who may have been left worried about the potential battery life upgrades (or lack thereof) on Samsung’s 2025 flagship. That said, these same rumored benchmarks paint a disappointing picture of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4’s CPU performance, which could well mean that the Galaxy S25 Ultra offers little to no tangible speed improvements over the Galaxy S24.
Indeed, @negativeonehero ends their X post with the comment: “If you care about CPU performance, please skip this generation and wait for 8G5 [the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5].”
Mind you, as we noted in our defense of the iPhone 16’s rumored lack of performance upgrades over the iPhone 15 Pro, we’ve arguably reached saturation point when it comes to the speed of flagship phones. Do we really need these devices to be any faster? The Galaxy S24 Ultra is among the most powerful phones ever made, and we’d wager that you’d hardly notice the real-world performance difference even if the Galaxy S25 Ultra brought dramatic CPU improvements to the table.
We’d much rather Qualcomm prioritizes energy efficiency over performance boosts with its upcoming Snapdragon chipset, and by the sounds of things the company is doing just that. We expect to hear more about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 at this year’s edition of Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit, so check back with TechRadar in October for the latest Galaxy-relevant announcements.
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axel.metz@futurenet.com (Axel Metz)
