GoKawiilSamsung’s custom chip efforts haven’t exactly enjoyed smooth sailing. After years of manufacturing setbacks, design changes, and repeated hiatuses, the company is finally aiming to get Exynos back on track. For global customers, that comeback begins with the Galaxy S26, where Samsung’s in-house silicon returns to the flagship lineup.
Exynos has endured a turbulent decade. The Galaxy S23 skipped it entirely due to inconsistent performance, overheating, and poor efficiency, while last year’s Galaxy S series also sidelined it — likely influenced by Qualcomm’s major leap with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, alongside reported low yields from Samsung’s 3nm process. Although an Exynos 2500 did surface in the Z Flip 7, its limited use underscored ongoing challenges. In response, Samsung has restructured its chip design and manufacturing teams, with ambitious plans to revitalize Exynos, including a long-rumored custom GPU for the upcoming Exynos 2800.
Graphics have been a defining part of this journey. Over the past four generations, Samsung has leaned on AMD’s RDNA architecture for its Xclipse GPUs, marking a shift away from Arm’s Mali, starting with the Exynos 2200 in 2022. With Exynos making its comeback — and more ambitious graphics plans ahead — it’s a good moment to reflect on the past three processors, spanning five phone generations, to assess whether Samsung’s custom silicon strategy has ultimately helped or hindered its flagship devices.
Exynos has become a lot better
For starters, let’s look at Exynos in isolation across recent Galaxy S flagships (we’ll leave out the Z Flip 7’s Exynos 2500 for a more like-for-like comparison). Between the Exynos 2200 and 2600, single-core CPU performance in Geekbench 6 has climbed 111%, while multi-core is up 211%. That’s a huge leap, and a clear sign that Arm’s off-the-shelf CPU cores are still scaling well, even without the fully custom designs used by Apple and Qualcomm.
Graphics tells a similar story. Performance is up 212% in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and 253% in the Solar Bay ray-tracing test over the same period. AMD’s Xclipse GPU has matured nicely too, ironing out early driver issues and now delivering the kind of raw power expected of a modern flagship GPU.
All told, Exynos has roughly tripled its performance between the 2200 and 2600. That said, most of that jump came with the 2400, which nearly doubled performance outright. The 2600 is a more modest step forward, offering gains of 40–60% across various tests. In isolation, that’s still an excellent trajectory — one the PC market would envy. The problem is that Exynos hasn’t been improving in isolation.
AMD vs Arm for mobile graphics
Brady Snyder / Android Authority
Samsung’s shift to AMD’s untested RDNA architecture was a bold, risky move. The Exynos 2200 was first to market with hardware-accelerated ray tracing on mobile, giving Samsung a clear feature advantage and a strong marketing angle around gaming.
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