The new chip from Samsung supports cameras of up to 320MP and newly adopts the APV codec, which further improves detail and color precision in videos to a professional level.

Delivering up to a 39% performance improvement over the Exynos 2500, the new chip from Samsung uses Arm’s latest cores—Arm C1-Ultra and C1-Pro—along with Arm’s compute subsystem, the Exynos 2600 delivers powerful performance. Whereas its predecessor was outfitted with a tri-cluster structure of big, middle, and little cores, it upgrades the little cores to middle cores to cover a broader performance envelope — improving efficiency without compromising peak performance.

Samsung says that, on top of that, the latest Arm v9.3 architecture empowers on-CPU machine learning performance. With support for the Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) instruction, AI computation efficiency and processing speed have been further improved, minimizing response latency during on-device AI execution to improve the overall user experience. This enhancement improves overall CPU computing performance up to 39% and boosts power efficiency.

With marked advancements in AI and gaming, as expected, the Exynos 2600 pioneers heat management by adopting the Heat Path Block (HPB) — a first in the mobile SoC industry — and improves thermal dissipation efficiency through the application of High-k EMC. The HPB optimizes the heat-transfer path to disperse heat more efficiently, helping the Exynos 2600 sustain high performance within a size suitable for mobile devices. That improved heat flow lowers thermal resistance up to 16%, allowing internal heat to move outward more quickly so the SoC’s internal temperature remains stable, even under heavy loads. As a result, overall performance is enhanced, giving you consistently smooth and reliable experiences in demanding scenarios like high-end gaming and AI processing. Or video…

In fact, according to Samsung, the Exynos 2600 delivers a premium mobile photography experience, supporting cameras of up to 320MP and adopting the APV codec, which further improves detail and color precision in videos to a professional level. Obviously, a lot of AI is behind these features. Samsung mentions the introduction of an AI-based Visual Perception System (VPS) allows the ISP to recognize a variety of detailed elements — even blinking — within images and videos, and process them in real time, while reducing power consumption by up to 50% compared to its predecessor.

Moreover, the Exynos 2600 brings, Samsung adds, “additional enhancements that serve to vastly improve the overall camera experience, including Deep learning Video Noise Reduction (DVNR), which enhances video quality in low-light conditions at low power. This AI-based improvement enables you to get the best results with just one capture.”

Let’s just hope the user is given the option to deactivate all that AI when he/she just wants to create images, be it stills or videos. AI is becoming extremely irritating, in fact. Example? Samsung’s page about the new chip has a nagging question appearing all the time – “Interested in learning more about Exynos 2600?” – that keeps covering the information in the background. When I clicked on it  to see if it would go way, the answer was (see screenshot): “I apologize, but I still can’t find any information about an “Exynos 2600” in my current data. It’s possible that this is a very new product that hasn’t been widely announced or released”. Can someone tell the AI that it’s right there, on the page it is covering?