Samsung’s Galaxy A25 5G has been a global bestseller, with the budget phone appealing to the masses who want a reliable Samsung phone with good software for an affordable price.
Now, it seems that the company is planning to continue this momentum with the Galaxy A26 5G, which is expected to be released soon.
Recent Vulkan and CPU score results surfacing onย Geekbench v6.3.0 have revealed important details about the chipset powering the upcoming Galaxy A26 5G.
It seems that the upcoming phone will be powered by the Exynos 1280 chipset, which, on paper, is exactly the same as its predecessor (Galaxy A25 5G). However, a difference is clearly noticeable.
The difference lies in the clock speeds. The Exynos 1280 used on the Galaxy A25 has two Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz and six Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz.
But the Geekbench result of the Galaxy A26 shows an overclocked version of the chipset, which has the two Cortex-A78 cores clocked 200 MHz higher, at as high as 2.6 GHz. The Cortex-A55 cores remain at 2.0 GHz. The GPU is confirmed to be the same Mali-G68 as the original Exynos 1280 inside the Galaxy A25.
The Vulkan listing further confirms the model number of the Galaxy A26, which is SM-A266B, and hints at a 6 GB RAM variant of the phone, with a higher variant of 8 GB RAM also expected.
The CPU listing, where the phone scored 807 points in Single-Core and 1946 points in Multi-Core, also shows that the company is testing the Galaxy A26 on Android 15, which means that it could boot with Android 15-based One UI 6.0 out-of-the-box, which is impressive. The One UI 7.0 update could become available at a later date.
Now, the question arises: why would Samsung opt to overclock the Exynos 1280? There could be several reasons. It could be that the company is finally able to refine the fabrication of its Exynos 1280 chipset and hence can run them at higher clock speeds without thermal issues.
The more plausible reason remains Samsung’s attempts to simply catch up with the competition. The Galaxy A25 was a very underpowered and weak phone when it first came out, with the Exynos 1280 competing with chipsets like Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, Dimensity 7300, and even the 8s Gen3 (depending on markets), and all these chipsets are far superior to the poor Exynos.
Perhaps the overclocking of the Exynos 1280 is a very lazy attempt to try and catch up with the competition, but only time will tell if it turns out to be a good decision.