The Galaxy S26 could feature a home-grown Exynos 2600 SoC rather than a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. Samsung hasn't said its last word and wants to establish itself in the field of 2nm engravings.
For years, Samsung has struggled with the design of high-end Exynos SoCs to equip its premium smartphones. On the current generation, the Galaxy S25, the South Korean group's semiconductor division even failed to develop a chip powerful enough to convince the Samsung Mobile eXperience (MX) teams to adopt it. All models in the series thus benefit from a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip from Qualcomm.
According to the leaker Jukanlosreve, Samsung will once again use an in-house SoC, the Exynos 2600, for the Galaxy S26. This information is likely to disappoint more than one, as the performance of Exynos chips is historically inferior to that of Snapdragon. The source specifies that it does not know at this stage if the SF2 process (2 nm engraving) on which the Exynos 2600 will be based will be competitive against TSMC technologies (whose processes are used for Apple and Qualcomm chips).
A 2 nm Exynos 2600 for the Galaxy S26?
It is specified that the production volume of the Exynos 2600 is likely to be limited in any case. If this is confirmed, it is likely that Samsung will resort to an old strategy: equipping its smartphones with a Snapdragon chip in the United States, Canada and China, but with an Exynos chip in the rest of the world. We can also think that the Galaxy S26 Ultra will be powered by a Qualcomm SoC, while the Galaxy S26 and S26+ will be satisfied with the Exynos 2600, as was already the case in the past.
We are still a long way from the release of the Galaxy S26 and the situation can obviously still evolve. The stakes are high for Samsung, which has been totally absent from the debates on the generation of 3nm engravings and which is now concentrating its efforts on 2nm processes. Once again, the battle for performance with TSMC promises to be complicated.
For its part, Google no longer has confidence in Samsung: the Tensor G5 SoC of the next Pixel 10 should be based on on a TSMC node, while the Tensors were until now based on a Samsung architecture. S26.
But the chip volume is so limited that it’ll likely be similar to the Exynos 990 situation.
I’m not sure if SF2 is actually any good.
— Jukanlosreve (@Jukanlosreve) March 30, 2025
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