Samsung’s current non-foldable flagship smartphone lineup, the Galaxy S25 series, features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor, which is arguably the best overall chipset for Android devices currently. For the next lineup of non-foldable flagship phones, the Galaxy S26 series, Samsung is moving away from Qualcomm and going with the Exynos 2600. While there’s no information about how it performs, it will be very tough for the SoC to beat Qualcomm’s upcoming flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2.

On Weibo, Digital Chat Station claims that Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will offer 25% higher CPU performance. According to the tipster, its GPU will have a 16MB cache, which is 4MB more than what the current SoC offers. That will help it offer 30% higher graphics performance. Furthermore, DCS claims that the SoC will support LPDDR5X or LPDDR6. These performance lifts are very significant, which will make the already great chipset even better, and very hard for Exynos 2600 to beat it.

Samsung wanted to go with the 3nm-based Exynos 2500 with the Galaxy S25 series. However, the yield rate of Samsung Foundry’s 3nm fabrication process hadn’t reached acceptable levels, and therefore, the brand had to go with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite.

The Exynos 2600 uses 2nm nodes. According to various reports, the yield rate of Samsung Foundry’s 2nm fabrication process has reached 40%, and the brand has set up a team to bump up the yield rate to 70% to 80% to make the Exynos 2600 in time for the Galaxy S26 series.