Samsung’s Exynos 2600 to power Galaxy S26 series

(Samsung Electronics)

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. is set to begin mass production of its in-house mobile application processor (AP), the Exynos 2600, next month and install the chip in the upcoming Galaxy S26 series.

According to industry sources on Monday, Samsung’s System LSI Business unit has completed development of the Exynos 2600 and will begin mass production and supply in November for integration into the company’s flagship Galaxy S26 smartphones.

The Exynos is Samsung’s proprietary mobile AP designed by the System LSI Business unit within its Device Solutions (DS) division, which handles semiconductors, and manufactured by its Foundry Business unit.

The decision to use the Exynos 2600 in the Galaxy S26 series, scheduled for release early next year, was made after the chip’s performance and yield reached stable levels.

Samsung’s internal testing showed that the Exynos 2600’s neural processing unit (NPU) performance - critical for generative artificial intelligence (AI) tasks such as large language models (LLMs) - is more than six times higher than that of Apple Inc.’s latest in-house AP, the A19 Pro.

Compared with Qualcomm Inc.’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Elite, the Exynos 2600 demonstrated 30 percent higher NPU performance and up to 29 percent higher graphic processing unit (GPU) performance.

Samsung’s 2-nanometer (nm) process technology (1 nm = one billionth of a meter), which is applied to the Exynos 2600, has also reportedly achieved 85 percent of its target performance level.

Another key improvement stems from Samsung’s decision to separate the AP (Exynos) and modem within the system-on-chip (SoC) architecture for the first time.

Samsung had integrated both components in previous Galaxy S models, but it adopted a discrete modem design for the Galaxy S26 series, allowing it to expand central processing unit (CPU) and GPU areas within the AP for enhanced performance.

Industry sources suggest that the Exynos 2600 could be featured in the Galaxy S26 Ultra, the top-tier model of the Galaxy S26 series, although the Exynos adoption ratio will vary by country and model.

If the Exynos 2600 is installed in the Galaxy S26 Ultra, it would mark the return of an Exynos chip to the top-of-the-line Galaxy S series model after four years, since the Galaxy S22 Ultra.