Exynos 2600 reportedly generates M5-like scorers on Geekbench
All Galaxy S26 models in the U.S., China, and Japan could be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Eliter Gen 5 for Galaxy. In the past, any hint that a Galaxy S Ultra model would feature a Samsung Exynos chip would have been laughed at. But Sammy has been working on the chipset which seems to be greatly improved. Besides being made with the 2nm process node, it will use Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistors which prevent current leaks and improve the drive current. This leads the chip to be more powerful and energy efficient.
This is reportedly a Geekbench test result for the Exynos 2600 AP. | Image credit-Wccftech
We must put an asterisk next to these numbers because a visit to Geekbench’s own data fails to show these results. So we can conclude that either the results were taken down, the numbers are made up, or the benchmark test never occurred. And these numbers are important because if legit, the single-core results would match those put up by Apple’s M5 chip and would be the fastest smartphone SoC in the single-core category, a metric that Apple’s A-series AP has historically owned.
The 2nm Exynos 2600 has a higher benchmark tally than the 3nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Assuming that the score is legit, even more exciting for Samsung, the Exynos 2600 Geekbench score beat out the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 single-core and multi-core scores of 2,865 and 9,487 respectively. This could be an exciting time for Samsung Foundry which is a distant number two in the contract foundry business, well behind TSMC. As of the second quarter, TSMC had 70.2% of the foundry market compared to 7.3% for Samsung Foundry.
Samsung Foundry’s yields are believed to have improved sharply. While Samsung doesn’t give out this information, it became apparent in 2022 that there was a problem with Samsung Foundry’s yields as Qualcomm took its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 AP business away from Samsung and moved it to TSMC. After a slight design change, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Since then, Qualcomm has relied on TSMC to produce all of its flagship application processors.
It’s been an impressive rise for Samsung’s Exynos AP
It’s hard to imagine the Exynos 2600 being mentioned in the same breath as the Apple M5. In 2019-2020, Samsung shut its custom core development team as its “Mongoose” cores were leading its Exynos chips to constantly underperform Qualcomm’s Snapdragon components while also being less efficient. By the way, M5 achieved a single-core score of 4,263 or 1.09% higher than the Exynos 2600 results. The M5 multi-core score of 17,862 was 32% above the Exynos 2600 tally.
