Samsung had a tough time with its 3nm Exynos 2500 chip due to poor yield. However, that may not be the case with the next-generation Exynos 2600, its first 2nm SoC. The company is trying hard to improve its yield, and if everything goes well, it could power the upcoming Galaxy S26 series. Unfortunately, we do not have much information on its performance.
Meanwhile, its competitor, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite 2, looks set to bring substantial improvements in CPU and GPU performance. This raises a question about whether the Exynos 2600 can keep up with the competition.
Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 may deliver a huge performance boost
Qualcomm is gearing up to launch the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 in the second half of the year, most probably in October 2025. Much ahead of its debut, renowned tipster Digital Chat Station has revealed exciting information about its performance. They made a Weibo post hinting at a massive performance boost.
The tipster claims that the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will adopt Qualcomm’s second-generation Oryon CPU cores, increasing CPU performance by about 25% compared to the first-gen solution. In the GPU department, it will use a 16MB cache instead of the 12MB cache, allowing for a performance boost of about 30%. On top of that, the chip will support new generation high-speed LPDDR5X and LPDDR6, which could improve performance and efficiency.
Last month, Geekbench 6 benchmarks for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 surfaced online. The benchmark revealed a 25% improvement in the single-core test, while the multi-core test achieved a 20% improvement over its predecessor. The chipset’s Adreno 840 GPU runs at 1.35GHz, which will help improve graphics performance.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will be built on TSMC’s 3nm N3P process, while the Exynos 2600 will be built using its 2nm process. So, theoretically, the Exynos 2600 chip should also offer substantial improvement over its predecessor due to its smaller node, though factors like cache size and memory bandwidth play important roles in overall performance. It will be interesting to see if the Exynos 2600 chip will match the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2’s performance on paper.
