The Exynos 2600, which is Samsung’s flagship smartphone chipset for the year 2026, has several new technologies. It is the world’s first smartphone chip made on a 2nm process node and the first Exynos in recent years to not feature an integrated cellular modem. Apparently, it is also the first smartphone chip to use a GPU based on AMD’s RDNA4 architecture.
A report from South Korean publication The Elec has revealed that the Xclipse 960 GPU inside the Exynos 2600 uses AMD’s RDNA4-based MGFX4 architecture. This newer architecture improves the performance and efficiency per compute unit (CU). Each workgroup processor (AMD’s official computational block) inside RDNA GPUs has two CUs.
The Xclipse 960 GPU reportedly has a total of eight WGPs (16 CUs) that are clocked at 980MHz compared to 999MHz of the Xclipse 950 GPU inside the Exynos 2500. Despite a lower clock speed, the newer GPU claims to have performance that is 2x faster than the Exynos 2500’s GPU. It is also 50% faster in ray-tracing performance compared to the previous-generation Exynos chip.
MGFX is Samsung’s reduced and modified version of AMD’s RDNA, which is a desktop-grade GPU architecture. The South Korean firm modified the RDNA intellectual property (IP) to fit its smartphone chipsets, which are much smaller and have to use much less power. The Exynos 2200 used the RDNA2-based MGFX2 architecture, while the Exynos 2400 and the Exynos 2500 used the MGFX3 architecture.
Samsung first started working with AMD on a mobile GPU in 2019, and the Exynos 2200 was the first result of the collaboration. The Exynos 2400 (2024) and the Exynos 2500 (2025) used GPUs co-developed by AMD and Samsung. The Exynos 2600 uses AMD’s RDNA4 architecture, but its development was done in-house by Samsung. The Exynos 2800 will reportedly be the first Exynos chip to use Samsung’s in-house GPU architecture.
While Samsung has promised a lot, it remains to be seen what the real-world performance of the Exynos 2600 would be like in terms of gaming and efficiency. It would also be interesting to see how it compares with rival chips from Apple, MediaTek, and Qualcomm.
