Ahead of the planned release of the Galaxy S26 series, Samsung has officially announced the Exynos 2600, its next-generation top smartphone engine. As the world’s first smartphone system-on-chip made with a 2nm Gate-All-Around method, the new chip is a big step forward for Samsung Semiconductor.
The company says that switching to 2nm is meant to make performance more efficient and improve how the chips handle heat, which were both problems with earlier Exynos chips. In some countries, the Exynos 2600 is likely to power some Galaxy S26 smartphones, but Samsung hasn’t revealed which models just yet.
Claims about CPU design and performance
The Exynos 2600 has a 10-core CPU that is built on Arm’s v9.3 design. Samsung has changed its core layout so that it no longer uses any standard low-power cores. Instead, it uses a mix of high-performance and efficiency-focused cores.
One prime C1-Ultra core running at 3.8GHz, three high-performance C1-Pro cores at 3.25GHz, and six efficiency-focused C1-Pro cores at 2.75GHz make up the CPU setup. Samsung says that this setup gives the CPU up to 39% more power than the Exynos 2500 from the previous version. This version also includes support for ARM’s SME2 instructions, which makes machine learning tasks better on the device.
Ability to do graphics and AI
The Exynos 2600 has the Xclipse 960 GPU built in for images. In addition to up to 50 per cent better ray tracing speed, Samsung says the new GPU can do twice as much computing as the old one. This chip also has Exynos Neural Super Sampling, which uses AI to improve game speed and power efficiency by upscaling and creating frames.
An updated NPU handles AI processing. Samsung claims that it provides 113% better AI performance than the previous top Exynos chip. The goal is to support more powerful creative AI features on the device while also making data protection stronger.
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Improvements to the camera, video, and temperature
The Exynos 2600’s built-in ISP works with camera sensors up to 320MP and lets you take pictures at 108MP without any flash lag. It can take 8K video at 30 frames per second and 4K video at up to 120 frames per second with HDR support and Samsung’s APV codec.
As a solution to long-standing problems with heating, Samsung has created Heat Path Block technology. This uses High-k EMC materials to lower thermal resistance by as much as 16 per cent. It has LPDDR5X memory, UFS 4.1 storage, HDR10+ playing, and 4K screens that can go up to 120Hz. The Exynos 2600 is now being mass-produced.
