If you’ve followed the story of Samsung’s phones for any length of time, the debate around Snapdragon and Exynos will be familiar to you. Now, thanks to a report, it looks like we’re going back into that debate for the Samsung Galaxy S26 – and things are going to get complicated.
Over the past decade, Samsung has used a mixture of hardware to power its phones. The most familiar – and the most popular – is Qualcomm Snapdragon.
Indeed, over the past couple of years, Samsung has used a slightly overclocked version of the latest Snapdragon hardware, in a special “for Galaxy” edition. That first appeared in the Galaxy S23. That year also saw Snapdragon globally, something that Samsung repeated for the Galaxy S25.
Please enable Javascript to view this content
But while Samsung fans may have breathed a collective sigh of relief in 2025, in 2026 there’s expected to be a collective groan. That’s because Exynos is making its way back to the Galaxy S line-up, according to a reliable leaker on X.
There’s no bones about it either: “The Exynos 2600 is definitely back and it will be used in the S26”, reinforcing a previous rumor that Samsung was enthusiastic about Exynos 2600 manufacturing. So what does all this mean?
Exynos is Samsung’s own hardware, which comes from its own foundries. The company has used this hardware on and off since the Galaxy S II in 2011. There’s usually a regional divide between who gets which hardware, with the US, Canada and China (and some other regions) getting Snapdragon, while most of the rest of the world – like Europe – get Exynos.
The advantage for Samsung is likely the lower cost than buying hardware from Qualcomm, while also reducing its dependency on one supplier. Samsung has always strived for independence like this, with Tizen originally pitched as a rival to Android, a separate Galaxy Store and so on.
The downside is that Exynos hardware is seen as inferior, which has a negative marketing value, while triggering no end of comparisons and debate online about which version is better.
In the past it’s been highlighted that some Exynos modems didn’t support cellular standards, like mmWave for example, so using different hardware was necessary. But that’s well in the past now.
For those in the US, this is likely to be little more than an amusing pastime for Galaxy S26 buyers: you’ll probably get Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 in your phone and that will be the end of that.
The Exynos 2600, however, is said to be the product of Samsung’s 2nm process (the current Snapdragon 8 Elite is 3nm). Making the transistors on the chip smaller generally leads to greater efficiency and improved performance for the size, which is what Samsung is striving for.
But each year we get a will they/won’t they debate around Exynos in the Galaxy S and this year appears no different. We’ll have to wait until January 2026 to actually find out, however.
