The wait is finally over. Samsung has officially dropped the details on its next-gen flagship processor, the Exynos 2600. On paper, it looks like the beast we’ve heard so much about in the leaks.

If you’ve been following the rumor mill, you know the stakes for the South Korean technology giant are higher than ever. After the rollercoaster of the last few years, Samsung is finally going all-in with the industry’s first 2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) process. Yes, we are moving past the 3nm standard that powered recent flagships, and the promised leaps in performance and efficiency look significant.

Here is everything you need to know about the chip that will likely power variants of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S26 series, including the Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26 Plus models.

World’s first 2nm mobile chip

Obviously, the biggest highlight here is the manufacturing process. The new Exynos 2600 is built on Samsung Foundry’s cutting-edge SF2 node. But beyond the jargon, what does this actually mean for your daily driver? The company claims a massive 30% boost in power efficiency over the previous-generation Exynos 2500, alongside a raw 15% uplift in overall performance.

To keep all that potential from throttling, the chipset alsso introduces a new Heat Path Block or HPB technology designed to reduce thermal resistance by 16%. This should ensure your phone stays cooler, even during those intense gaming marathons.

Breaking: Samsung officially drops the Exynos 2600 introduction video 👀

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— Tarun Vats (@tarunvats33) December 19, 2025

Official video: Samsung Exynos 2600

Under the hood, Samsung is shaking up the architecture to back up these claims. According to official spec sheets and leaks from South Korean outlets, the Exynos 2600 upgrades to a new deca-core design aimed at multi-threaded workloads. The setup is headlined by a single Cortex-C1 Ultra clocked at a blistering 3.9GHz for burst performance, supported by three Cortex-C1 Pro cores at 3.25GHz and six additional Cortex-C1 Pro cores running at 2.75GHz. Perhaps the most interesting bit of news is that you won’t find any “little” efficiency cores this time around, meaning Samsung is betting that its 2nm process is robust enough to run those performance cores for background tasks without draining your battery.

Better gaming, AI, and camera features

Graphics duties are handled by the new Xclipse 960 GPU, still built on AMD’s RDNA architecture like the previous generation. It promises a 50% improvement in ray-tracing performance, which should make lighting and reflections in supported games look console-quality.

And with Galaxy AI now being the core of Samsung’s software identity, the Exynos 2600’s NPU delivers a reported 113% increase in generative AI performance. This opens the door for some powerful on-device tricks, from real-time video editing to getting instant, lag-free responses from your AI assistant without ever needing to connect to the cloud.

For the shutterbugs, the new ISP is a powerhouse. It supports single camera sensors up to 320 megapixels, which is way beyond the current 200-megapixel standard on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. On top of that, the chip features a new Visual Perception System, which basically acts like a brain for your camera.

Instead of wasting energy blindly processing every single pixel, this system uses AI to instantly recognize and lock onto fine details — like textures or faces — in real-time. By knowing exactly what to focus on, the chip doesn’t have to work nearly as hard to get the perfect shot, which ultimately cuts power consumption during photography by up to a massive 50%.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 series is expected to be the first to showcase the Exynos 2600, with reports pegging the official launch for late February 2026 during the next Galaxy Unpacked event. But the roadmap doesn’t stop there. The brand has hinted that its new 2nm architecture is specifically optimized for ultrathin chassis designs, all but confirming that we’ll see the processor trickle down to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 and Galaxy Z Flip8 in the second half of next year.

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