Samsung has officially unveiled the Exynos 2600, a flagship mobile processor that’ll rumble under certain Galaxy S26 devices and reboot the Korean company’s silicon story.
Built on a 2nm Gate-All-Around process, the chip is aimed at improved performance, better thermals, and big leaps in on-device AI — three areas where past Exynos generations have endeavored to close the gap with rivals.
- A 2nm Leap With GAA Nanosheets Improves Power Efficiency
- Ten Cores on Arm v9.3 Without Little Cores
- Xclipse 960 Graphics – Real‑Time Ray Tracing
- On-Device AI Performance and Capabilities on Exynos 2600
- Imaging Pipeline Built for Speed and High-Resolution Capture
- Thermals, Memory, and Connectivity Across the Platform
- What It Means for Galaxy S26 Devices and Regional Variants
A 2nm Leap With GAA Nanosheets Improves Power Efficiency
The headliner is Samsung Foundry’s 2nm GAA technology. By surrounding the channel with nanosheet gates, GAA offers reduced leakage and better control than FinFET, allowing for higher clocks while consuming less power. Samsung shares that both architectural and process changes help yield efficiency gains and improved thermal dissipation, including a decrease of up to 16% in thermal resistance through new Heat Path Block packaging with High‑k EMC materials.
If these gains are realized in real-world devices, they could alleviate the sustained performance drops and throttling that have eluded previous Exynos chips. Competitive context is also important here: there’s TSMC’s own nanosheet-based N2 roadmap to consider, and the industry at large will be watching how quickly GAA goes from manufacturing promise to something that users can actually feel.
Ten Cores on Arm v9.3 Without Little Cores
Under the bonnet is a 10‑core CPU based on Arm’s latest v9.3 instruction set featuring new C1‑Ultra and C1‑Pro cores. In one significant change, Samsung has jettisoned conventional low‑power “little” cores in favour of a mix that’s tiered between big and high‑performance mid cores. Up to a 39% CPU uplift compared with Exynos 2500, it claims.
Support for Arm’s SME2 instructions is supposed to accelerate matrix math and minimize latency for on‑device AI. Dropping little cores is a dramatic scheduling gamble: responsiveness under bursty loads may improve, and idle/background efficiency depends on deep power gating and smarter task migration — both of which will come down to Samsung’s software tuning once retail phones are shipping.
Xclipse 960 Graphics – Real‑Time Ray Tracing
The Xclipse 960 GPU offers double the compute performance of the prior generation and up to 50% faster ray tracing, Samsung said. AI‑powered upscaling and frame generation deliver an improved gaming experience. AI‑assisted technology means you can now upscale mobile games to higher resolutions by automatically adjusting settings or even upscaling a frame in real time, depending on the power of your device.
Mobile ray tracing is still a fledgling technology, and only a few titles on Android use advanced lighting effects, but there is also the potential for a steadier frame rate at 60–120 Hz — it remains to be seen if the improved thermal path can allow for holding clocks for longer sessions.
On-Device AI Performance and Capabilities on Exynos 2600
According to Samsung, the enhanced NPU boosts AI performance by 113%, and it can now run larger multimodal and generative models on-device. That has practical upside: quicker voice synthesis, on‑device image construction, and greater privacy for tasks no longer requiring cloud round‑trips.
This push reflects a general market trend that has not been unnoticed by research firms such as Counterpoint Research, which report on‑device AI being one of the prime differentiators for premium phones. The Exynos 2600 also focuses on hardened security, Samsung says, with safeguards designed to protect sensitive information and adapt to new threat models.
Imaging Pipeline Built for Speed and High-Resolution Capture
The in‑built ISP is capable of handling sensors up to 320 MP and zero‑shutter‑lag at 108 MP, suggesting a focus on real‑time capture at high resolution. Video maxes out at 8K30, supporting 4K up to 120 fps and HDR, as well as Samsung’s APV codec for higher‑quality footage.
Samsung has also included a Visual Perception System that is capable of tracking subtle facial movements such as blinking in real time, and a Deep Learning Video Noise Reduction pipeline for better low‑light clips. The company claims the ISP is up to 50% more power‑efficient, which should be good news for those long 4K HDR shoots.
Thermals, Memory, and Connectivity Across the Platform
Outside of the freshened‑up Heat Path Block, there’s LPDDR5X memory support, UFS 4.1 storage, HDR10+ playback, and 4K displays up to 120 Hz. Samsung says the solution is paired with an external modem and connectivity chip rather than integrating all of that within the die, a decision that gives it more flexibility to configure its platform variants while also complicating design considerations for OEMs.
The true test will be long‑term loads: high‑refresh gaming, ongoing AI inferencing, and 4K120 video recording. Look for reviewers to test frequency stability, skin temperature, and watt‑hours per frame when devices arrive.
What It Means for Galaxy S26 Devices and Regional Variants
Specific phones are not named by Samsung, but the Exynos 2600 is now a mass‑production part and it’s widely assumed to be bound for the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus in some regions as they maintain their dual‑sourcing approach with third‑party chipsets. The reward is huge: if Samsung can match or beat the latest Snapdragon and Dimensity parts when it comes to efficiency and thermals, Exynos will be a true global contender again.
On paper, it sounds all right — 2nm GAA, a rebalanced CPU cluster, a more capable GPU, and a much stronger NPU. The verdict now rests on those independent benchmarks and, critically, how good the Galaxy S26 hardware — not to mention cooling and software tuning — is at unlocking what the silicon promises.
