Just weeks after Samsung announced its first 3nm smartphone chip, the Exynos 2500, details about the company’s in-house chip for the Galaxy S26 has been spotted. It is the Exynos 2600, and the South Korean firm has already started testing it six months ahead of the launch of its next-generation Galaxy S series phones.
The Exynos 2600 chip with model number S5E9965 was spotted in Geekbench’s database by tipster @Jukanlosreve. It appears to feature a 10-core CPU, similar to the Exynos 2500. It has one prime CPU (likely ARM Cortex-X935) core clocked at 3.55GHz, three performance CPU cores (likely ARM Cortex-A730) clocked at 2.96GHz, and six mid CPU cores running at 2.4GHz.
This CPU cluster arrangement appears similar to MediaTek’s recent flagship chips that lack any efficient CPU cores. This Exynos chip scored 2,155 points in the single-core test and 7,788 points in the multi-core test. We would advise you not to take these are final performance figures, as the chip is just being tested and performance increases closer to the launch.
This chip features Samsung’s in-house Xclipse 960 GPU that is compatible with Vulkan 1.4. It is likely based on AMD’s RDNA GPU architecture, but we aren’t sure which version of RDNA it is based on. It isn’t clear if it is a 2nm chip or a 3nm chip, but it will definitely be fabricated by Samsung Foundry.
The Exynos 2600 also appears to feature ARM’s Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) feature that accelerates matrix calculations and can boost AI and machine learning performance.
Since the upcoming chip was tested on an engineering device, the CPU’s clock speeds aren’t likely final. Samsung will likely tweak the CPU’s clock speeds based on the performance and thermals of the chip. The device features 12GB RAM and runs Android 16.
Exynos 2600 will likely be used only in the base Galaxy S26
A new report from Bloomberg claims (via @Jukanlosreve) that Samsung is evaluating the Exynos 2600 chip for the Galaxy S26, and that it will use both Exynos and Snapdragon chips in its next high-end phones.
Over the past few years, Samsung has been exclusively using Snapdragon chips in Galaxy S Ultra models. So, we think that the Galaxy S26 Ultra will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 processor.
A recent report claimed that Samsung is dropping the Plus model from the Galaxy S26 lineup in favor of the Galaxy S26 Edge, and if that is true, even that device will likely use a Snapdragon chip. So, that leaves room for just the base Galaxy S26 to feature the Exynos 2600.
