Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy A17 4G has just appeared on Geekbench, confirming that it will be powered by the MediaTek Helio G99 chipset. The company is said to launch at least two budget devices by the end of 2025, and one of them has already made a cameo on Geekbench to reveal some disappointing news.
If you remember the Samsung Galaxy A16 and A15, these devices were some of the earlier Galaxy A models with the Helio G99 chip. This platform is around two years old at this point, and Samsung has already used this chip twice for its entry-level phones, and now the Galaxy A17 will make it the third time.
It’s a 6nm chip with dual-core 2.2 GHz and six-core 2.0 GHz clusters for CPU processing. The GPU inside this SoC is a Mali-G57 MC2, which is already an aging integrated GPU, and it has been in commission since the Helio G96. Geekbench reveals that the Helio G99 performs even worse than the last generation, on this new Galaxy A17.
The benchmark scores are proof that the performance of Samsung's budget new model has gone down instead of going up this year. On a single core, this phone can do up to 730 points, and multi-core scores are around 1982. On its own, these scores are fairly decent, but Galaxy A15 with the same G99 chip scored 743 and 2005 points.
These results are disconcerting and do not inspire confidence in Samsung’s upcoming product. Of course, there’s a possibility that the tested device is still a prototype and there are some improvements to be made here. But the Galaxy A17 has been disappointing so far.
Geekbench also confirmed that the Galaxy A17 offers the bottom-of-the-barrel 4 GB starter RAM. For a device in its segment, this setup won’t appeal to many users, though Samsung might give you a choice to upgrade to 6 GB by paying more money.
After this Geekbench sighting, we can also be sure that the Galaxy A17 is being tested with Android 15 One UI 7, when Samsung intends to debut the upgraded Android 16 One UI 8 in July. This newcomer will be using outdated software when it comes out.
This sighting is only the beginning of what we assume will be a long string of leaks, reports, and rumors. We’ll be keeping an eye on this device, so make sure to stick around and stay in the loop every step of the way.
