Samsung’s next-generation flagship silicon brings a quietly revolutionary idea to smartphones: a built-in copper heatsink inside the phone SoC package itself. If the strategy pans out on Exynos 2600, it could not only save Samsung’s own thermals but be potentially licensed to competitors, like Qualcomm, in the future to bring Snapdragon heat under control, too.
What Samsung Is Building with Heat Pass Block (HPB)
As reported by ET News, Samsung has revealed a packaging method called Heat Pass Block (HPB), which includes a passive copper radiator within the chipset. Instead of depending only on the phone’s vapor chamber and graphite layers to wick heat away, HPB is designed to lower thermal resistance all the way at the source by enhancing the path from die through package down to your handset’s cooling stack.
Samsung also says the Exynos 2600 increases thermal efficiency by approximately 30% compared to the Exynos 2500. The 2600, though the exact specifications of both are untold, is generally considered to move over to a 2nm node and a deca-core design for its CPU with NVIDIA-derived graphics. Performance and transistor density generally lead to more heat in sustained loads — where an on-package heatsink could be a welcome fix.
Why It Matters for Snapdragon and Future Phones
Thermals have determined recent mobile chip storylines. The move from Samsung to TSMC for the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and beyond, one can assume, was motivated in part by efficiency and thermals. Today’s phones bear more demanding AI inference and high-refresh gaming, as well as 4K video capture — workloads that keep clocks elevated and readily reveal substandard cooling. Reviewers often see 20–40% (or greater) drops in sustained GPU or CPU throughput after a few minutes of something like running 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, or an extended period playing Genshin Impact.
If HPB somehow trims the die-to-chassis temperature delta, Snapdragon silicon atop Samsung’s future nodes might manage to scoot closer to peak clocks for longer. That’s important, too, as there are rumors that Qualcomm may task Samsung with spinning up a customized 2nm version of its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 family once the manufacturing process is up to snuff. Well, for Qualcomm to even think about such a move, Samsung would need to show the chip giant both yield and real-world thermal performance, which is, of course, where HPB comes into its own.
The Engineering Angle: On-Package Copper Heat Spreaders
On-package heat spreaders have been part of PC design for decades, but smartphones haven’t had that layer; they depend instead on thin device-level cooling. By fixing copper to the package, Samsung is hoping to reduce junction-to-case thermal resistance (the measurement of how much heat can transfer on its way out of the package) — enabling a more efficient path by which to dissipate it. In principle, this could reduce peak junction temperatures for a given power draw or enable the chip to run at higher temperatures for longer before throttling.
Two constraints remain. For one, the overall thermal budget is still constrained by the phone’s slim form factor — OEMs will need some damn good vapor chambers if they want to maximize any package-level improvements. Second, package changes may influence cost, thickness, and manufacturing complexity. Samsung will need to weigh these impacts in relation to that promised 30% efficiency boost.
There is also the fact that the timing coincides with a foundry race. Industry schedules indicate Samsung’s plans to bring 2nm for mobile ahead of the availability of TSMC’s more general process for handsets, while TSMC is concentrating on high-performance compute with N2 capacity initially. If Samsung can offer an attractive 2nm process alongside cooler-running packages, there’s a possibility it could win over customers who value sustained performance — potentially including Qualcomm and, longer term, Apple, which TSMC has been fiercely holding onto for its own chips since 2016.
Real-world payoff to watch in sustained performance
For you, the stakes are simpler: fewer thermal throttling spikes, smoother gaming performance, and consistent AI inference speeds during longer sessions. On-device LLMs and generative image-making can force NPUs and GPUs into sustained draw patterns few would have considered just a few years back. If HPB does hold clocks to a much tighter spread, the gap between the first minute and fifteenth can drop by an enormous amount.
Tests by independent checkers will tell the tale. Look out for close examinations of the Exynos 2600’s sustained scores in looping benchmarks (say, 15 to 30 minutes), thermal camera readings, and power traces. If the numbers check out from Samsung’s 30% claim, this same packaging could well be a practical fix for next-gen Snapdragon variants built on Samsung’s processes — and an outcome I think would have as much potential to reframe the foundry conversation yet again, as it has the performance charts.
Bottom line: HPB cooling could boost Exynos and Snapdragon
It’s not just a comfort metric to have a cooler chip; it is, in fact, for performance. Because smartphones aren’t going to stop growing more and more powerful, Samsung’s HPB plans to bring the cooling process upstream, near the source of heat. And if it pays off, then Exynos gets a new lease on life — and maybe Snapdragon will get a new road to run fast without running hot.
