Samsung Announces Exynos 2600 as World’s First 2nm Node Chipset for Flagship Galaxy Devices

Highlights

• The chip integrates CPU, GPU, and NPU for stronger AI performance
• Exynos 2600 features a new Xclipse 960 GPU with ray tracing support
• Heat Pass Block tech is used to improve thermal efficiency

Samsung Foundry on Friday officially announced Exynos 2600 as its latest flagship-grade mobile SoC, part of its in-house silicon efforts. The new processor is touted as not only Samsung's but the world's first built on a 2nm process with advanced GAA (Gate-All-Around) technology. Exynos. It is claimed to combine CPU, GPU, and NPU into a single compact chip for enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) and gaming experiences. Exynos 2600 is expected to debut early next year, most likely in the upcoming Galaxy S26 series.

Exynos 2600 Specifications

According to Samsung, the Exynos chipset sits above the Exynos 2500 as its newest mobile processor for flagship devices. The chip is built on Samsung Foundry's 2-nanometre GAA fabrication process. It features a proprietary CPU with eight cores. The architecture comprises a C1-Ultra core clocked at 3.8GHz, three C1-Pro cores operating at 3.25GHz, and six C1-Pro cores capped at 2.75GHz.

Samsung says Galaxy devices running this chipset will support up to LPDDR5x RAM and UFS 4.1 storage. Exynos features the Samsung Xclipse 960 deca-core GPU based on ARMv9.3 architecture and an AI engine with 32K MAC NPU as part of the single integrated chipset.

It also has support for ARM's Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME 2) — an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) extension, which can accelerate AI and ML-based applications and provide enhanced support for matrix operations. This enhancement is claimed to improve the overall CPU computing performance up to 39 percent, while also boosting the power efficiency.

Compared to the Exynos 2500, Samsung claims an improvement of 113 percent in generative AI performance and up to 50 percent better ray-tracing performance. It also features the Exynos Neural Super Sampling (ENSS) technology, which is said to boost gaming experiences by leveraging AI-based resolution upscaling and frame generation technologies.

To tackle the thermal issues associated with Exynos chipsets, the South Korean tech giant uses a technology called Heat Pass Block. It is said to optimise the heat-transfer path for more efficient heat dissipation. This is claimed to be as effective as a heat sink and lower thermal resistance up to 16 percent.

The chip also supports on-device displays with a maximum 4K or WQUXGA resolution with up to 120Hz refresh rate. As per the company, Galaxy smartphones equipped with the Exynos 2600 chip will be able to support up to 320-megapixel single camera sensors or 64-megapixel + 32-megapixel dual camera configurations. It also supports single-camera video recording at 108-megapixel resolution and 30 frames per second, and 8K 30fps encoding and decoding.

Samsung says Exynos 2600 has hardware-backed hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), which enables ROM-rooted protection for future-proof security.