Exynos 2600 tipped to power some Galaxy S26 Ultra variants with lofty GPU and NPU performance gains
With the Apple A19 Pro, MediaTek Dimensity 9500, and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 finally out and about, only one competitor is yet to surface in the highly competitive smartphone SoC market: Samsung's Exynos 2600. So far, it hasn't been imposing in leaked benchmarks, but that is to be expected because it is still months away from launch. Now, a new report makes some lofty claims about its performance.
Apparently, the Exynos 2600's NPU is a whopping 6x faster than the Apple A19 Pro's NPU in unspecified benchmarks. It boasts of a 14% performance improvement in multi-core CPU performance and 75% in GPU. The former is plausible, given the Exynos 2600 is all but confirmed to arrive with ten CPU cores. On the other hand, the GPU performance gains could come from an in-house GPU or AMD's RDNA IP.
The latest Exynos 2600 Geekbench listing has it barely outperforming the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 in multi-core performance. Its final version might fare marginally better, but on the GPU front, it has the Qualcomm silicon beat by 29%. If it uses the Arm Lumex C1-Ultra as its prime core as previously rumoured, its single-core performance could likely be on par with the MediaTek Dimensity 9500.
Exynos 2600 powered Galaxy S26 Ultra is on the cards
So far, the overwhelming consensus around the Galaxy S26 Ultra was that it would launch exclusively with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy like its predecessors. However, a new report says Samsung could use the Exynos 2600 in some regions. Given Exynos' historic struggles against Snapdragon, it is bound to cause some concerns among the community.
That said, Samsung has managed to run the Exynos 2600 at 85% of its maximum potential, so we could get an actually competitive chip this time. As a product of Samsung's SF2 node, it will launch as the world's first 2 nm smartphone SoC. Samsung seems to have sorted out issues with its stability and yields, both of which were rumoured to be abysmal earlier this year.
