Over the past few years, Samsung Semiconductor has struggled to deliver a competitive flagship smartphone SoC in its Exynos lineup. Even Samsung’s own smartphone division completely dropped Exynos from the flagship Galaxy S series lineup this year.
Today, Samsung Semiconductor announced the Exynos 2600, a flagship smartphone SoC expected to power select devices in the upcoming Galaxy S26 series. Samsung claims it has made significant improvements over its predecessor, which was poorly received by the industry.
The Samsung Exynos 2600 uses Arm C1-Ultra and C1-Pro, Arm’s latest CPU cores, along with Arm’s compute subsystem for improved performance. The Exynos 2500 was based on a tri-cluster design with big, middle, and little cores. Thanks to improved efficiency, Samsung has replaced all little cores with middle cores, enabling better overall performance. As a result, the Exynos 2600 delivers 39% higher CPU performance than the Exynos 2500 while being more efficient, aided by the industry’s first 2nm GAA process.
AI performance has become critical as an increasing number of applications rely on on-device AI processing. The NPU in the Exynos 2600 offers 113% better performance compared to its predecessor. Samsung also claims architectural improvements to enhance generative AI computational efficiency. In addition, the company has strengthened security through virtualization-based protections and hardware-backed hybrid post-quantum cryptography.
Samsung has historically lagged behind Qualcomm and Apple in mobile GPU performance. With the new architecture, the Exynos Xclipse 960 GPU delivers double the overall performance and up to 50% better ray tracing performance. Combined with Exynos Neural Super Sampling technology, gaming performance is expected to be noticeably smoother than on the previous generation.
Samsung has also upgraded the ISP to deliver an improved camera experience. The AI-based Visual Perception System enables the ISP to recognize detailed scene elements in real time while reducing power consumption by up to 50% compared to its predecessor. Deep Learning Video Noise Reduction improves low-light video quality at lower power, and the Exynos 2600 adds support for the APV codec to deliver better color and detail.
Finally, Samsung claims to have addressed one of the most common complaints about Exynos chipsets, thermal management. The Exynos 2600 introduces the Heat Path Block to improve thermal dissipation efficiency, allowing smartphones to sustain high performance for longer periods.