Could Exynos 2600 be Samsung’s long-awaited redemption arc?

For years, Samsung has struggled to escape the bad reputation its Exynos chips have earned. The Exynos 990 and the Exynos 2200 were particularly problematic.

While Samsung continued to make improvements to high-end Exynos chips, they still haven't reached the efficiency and performance levels of rival chips. They have repeatedly had the same issues: lower power efficiency than rival chips and performance throttling due to overheating.

Every year, Exynos chips look impressive on paper, and fans get excited. However, they mostly struggle to deliver chart-topping performance and consistency in real-world usage, especially during gaming and other intensive workloads.

The Exynos 2600 may finally be different, though. And it is not because of one significant change, but because Samsung appears to be solving long-standing issues from three different angles.

The Exynos 2600's headline feature is its newer fabrication process. It is the world’s first smartphone system-on-chip (SoC) built on a 2nm Gate-All-Around GAA process node.

While node names are no longer a perfect indicator of real-world gains, moving to 2nm still matters, as it offers the company a chance to fit more transistors in the same area, bringing higher performance using the same amount of power or using less power to do the same tasks.

If Samsung Foundry’s 2nm process delivers even modest gains over its previous nodes, it could directly address Exynos’ biggest weaknesses. It could bring better power efficiency, resulting in less heat and longer battery life.

Most importantly, it allows the chip to sustain high clock speeds under sustained load. This alone could narrow the gap with Apple’s and Qualcomm’s latest chips fabricated on TSMC's 3nm process node.

Exynos chips never lacked raw power, but the ability to sustain continuous use of that power was missing. While improved efficiency is crucial, it is equally important how the heat is managed, especially during workloads like gaming and continuous camera usage.

Consistency is far more valuable than short bursts of performance spikes. This is where Samsung’s new Heat Path Block (HPB) technology comes into play.

HPB is designed to efficiently move heat away from the chip. It improves how heat travels from the processor to the phone’s cooling system. If the Exynos 2600 can maintain higher clock speeds for longer, its real-world performance could finally match rival chips.

The Exynos 2600 is also the first smartphone chip to use AMD’s new RDNA4 GPU architecture. Previous Exynos chips (Exynos 2400 and Exynos 2500) used the RDNA3 architecture, which was already a step forward in the right direction.

RDNA4 is a much bigger leap, as it brings improved efficiency and an IPC performance uplift of around 20% in conventional graphics (rasterization).

The Xclipse 960 is also reportedly the first GPU that Samsung has developed in-house. Previous Xclipse GPUs were co-developed by AMD and Samsung using the RDNA architecture. The newer one uses AMD's architecture, but the whole development was reportedly carried out single-handedly by Samsung.

Samsung claims its new GPU offers up to 50% higher ray-tracing performance, higher frame rates, and better efficiency. Moreover, the Exynos Neural Super Sampling (ENSS), which is Samsung's AI-powered frame generation technique, doubles the frame rate in games when implemented by developers.

None of this guarantees success, though. Samsung still needs to prove that these new technologies translate into consistent and real-world improvements.

But for the first time in years, Samsung has used several newer technologies at the same time, and that makes us genuinely optimistic about the Exynos 2600.

If the chip delivers, it could be Samsung’s long-awaited redemption arc and could rewrite the entire narrative around Exynos chips.