Samsung’s hard reset after overheating woes: faster Exynos fans hopes of a comeback

[Financial News] Expectations are rising for performance improvements in the Exynos 2600, the latest mobile application processor (AP) that will power Samsung Electronics’ next-generation flagship smartphone series, the Galaxy S26. If the real-world performance of the Exynos 2600, designed and manufactured by Samsung Electronics, is validated, analysts expect the share of in-house chipsets in Samsung’s future mobile lineup to increase rapidly.
According to foreign media and the information technology (IT) industry on the 15th, the Galaxy S26 equipped with the Exynos 2600 and the Eclipse 960 GPU scored as high as 8,262 points in the Basemark Ray Tracing benchmark. This outperformed the Honor Magic 8 Pro with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (7,527 points) and the Vivo X300 Pro powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 (7,057 points). The Exynos 2600 is the world’s first mobile AP produced using a 2-nanometer process (1 nm is one-billionth of a meter).
In the MLPerf Inference Mobile v5.0 benchmark, the Exynos 2600 also posted higher scores than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in three of six tests: image classification, object detection, and natural language processing.
The Galaxy S26 lineup is widely expected to ship with both the Exynos 2600 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The base and Plus models are likely to use the Exynos 2600, while the Ultra model is expected to feature the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset.
The key question is whether Samsung has finally resolved the chronic overheating and performance throttling issues that plagued previous Exynos series chips in real-world use. Samsung Electronics says the Exynos 2600 delivers up to 39% higher CPU computing performance and up to 113% better generative AI performance than its predecessor, the Exynos 2500, while reducing thermal resistance by up to 16%. To tackle heat, Samsung has applied a heat pass block (HPB) to the Exynos 2600 for the first time in a mobile system-on-chip (SoC). This technology places a copper-based heat spreader on top of the chipset to quickly draw heat out of the die. The company expects this to significantly curb overheating while allowing higher clock speeds on the main core.
Samsung Electronics is aiming to restore the reputation of the Exynos line with the Exynos 2600 at the forefront.
Back in 2022, the Galaxy S22 series powered by the Exynos 2200 ran into overheating and performance degradation issues. In response, Samsung abruptly canceled mass production of the Exynos 2300 and equipped the entire Galaxy S23 lineup with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Two years later, the Galaxy S24, which mixed Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with the Exynos 2400, received positive reviews. However, last year’s Galaxy S25 once again shipped exclusively with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform.
To reduce its dependence on Qualcomm and ease component cost pressures, Samsung Electronics now needs to prove the improved performance of the Exynos 2600. In the third quarter of last year alone, the company’s mobile AP purchases reached an all-time high of 10.9275 trillion won, up 25.5% from 8.0751 trillion won a year earlier. Over the same period, the share of mobile APs in total raw material costs for the Device eXperience (DX) division rose from 16.6% to 19.1%.
The success of the Exynos 2600 is also expected to directly influence decisions on adopting the next-generation Exynos 2700 chipset. Kiwoom Securities forecasts that the Exynos 2700, which will enter mass production in the second half of this year on the second-generation 2-nanometer SF2P process, will power about 50% of the Galaxy S27 series. That would be a significant jump from the Exynos 2600’s projected 25% share within the Galaxy S26 lineup.
mkchang@fnnews.com Jang Min-kwon Reporter