Samsung bets big on AMD for Exynos – here’s how it’s actually working out

Samsung’s custom chip efforts haven’t exactly been smooth. After years of manufacturing setbacks, design changes, and repeated lag, the company is finally aiming to get Exynos back on track. For global customers, that comeback starts with the Galaxy S26, where Samsung’s in-house silicon returns to the flagship lineup.

Exynos has faced a tumultuous decade. The Galaxy S23 skipped it altogether due to inconsistent performance, overheating, and poor efficiency, while last year’s Galaxy S series also sidelined it – likely influenced by Qualcomm’s huge leap forward with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, as well as reported lower yields from Samsung’s 3nm process. Although the Z Flip 7 featured an Exynos 2500, its limited use underlined the ongoing challenges. In response, Samsung has reorganized its chip design and manufacturing teams with ambitious plans to revive 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 relied on AMD’s RDNA architecture for its Xclipse GPUs, marking a shift from Arm’s Mali, starting with the Exynos 2200 in 2022. With the return of Exynos – and more ambitious graphics plans moving forward – it’s a good moment to reflect on the last three processors spanning five phone generations, to assess whether Samsung’s custom silicon strategy has ultimately helped or hindered its flagship devices.

For starters, let’s look at the Exynos in recent Galaxy S flagships in isolation (we’ll leave out the Z Flip 7’s Exynos 2500 for a similar comparison). Between the Exynos 2200 and 2600, single-core CPU performance in Geekbench 6 has increased by 111%, while multi-core has increased by 211%. That’s a huge leap forward, and a clear sign that Arm’s off-the-shelf CPU cores still scale well even without the completely custom designs used by Apple and Qualcomm.

The graphics also tell a similar story. Performance in 3DMark Wildlife Extreme has increased by 212% and in the Solar Bay ray-tracing test by 253% over the same period. AMD’s Xclipse GPU has also matured well, overcoming early driver issues and now delivering the raw power expected from a modern flagship GPU.

All told, Exynos has almost tripled its performance between the 2200 and 2600. That said, most of the jump came with the 2400, which nearly doubled performance. The 2600 is a more modest step up, offering gains of 40-60% in various tests. In isolation, this is still an excellent trajectory – one that the PC market would envy. The problem is that Exynos isn’t improving alone.

Samsung’s switch to AMD’s unused RDNA architecture was a bold, risky move. The Exynos 2200 first came to market with hardware-accelerated ray tracing on mobile, giving Samsung a clear feature advantage and a strong marketing angle around gaming.

That lead didn’t last long. Qualcomm added ray tracing with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, while Arm refreshed its lineup with the Immortalis GPU series later the same year. Since Qualcomm’s in-house Adreno is off-limits, the more meaningful comparison is AMD vs. Arm – and here, the results are mixed.

Looking at MediaTek’s Dimensity 9200 (with the Immortalis-G715) up to the Dimensity 9500, Samsung’s early ray-tracing lead quickly evaporated. The Exynos 2200, despite launching earlier, lags the Dimensity 9200 by about 33% in ray tracing performance in 3DMark’s Solar Bay test – although the time difference makes that comparison a bit unfair.

This comparison points to the missing piece: the canceled Exynos 2300 from 2023. Based on the trendlines we drew, it probably would have been highly competitive, but performance issues prevented it from ever shipping. As things stand, Arm’s Immortalis GPUs are now consistently outperforming Exynos in an area where AMD should have dominated. The Exynos 2600, for example, lags the Dimensity 9500 by about 9% in this ray tracing test.

The bigger issue is traditional rasterization, which still makes far more sense for most mobile games. Here, Exynos has consistently lagged behind. The Dimensity 2200 was about 45% slower than the Dimensity 9200 in Wildlife Extreme, and even now, the Exynos 2600 is about 19% behind rival chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

This gap is actually wider than in previous dual-chip Galaxy S generations, which is not a good look for Samsung’s flagship chipset. Perhaps price, area, and power considerations still make this switch worthwhile from Samsung’s perspective, but from a gaming perspective, AMD’s Xclipse doesn’t offer a clear advantage.

None of this will come as a surprise to longtime Samsung followers. A decade ago, Exynos and Snapdragon were de facto counterparts, but recently, Snapdragon has moved ahead – and has stayed there.

Even when Exynos has appeared in new Galaxy S models, it has effectively become a second-tier option. Samsung’s Ultra models are based solely on Snapdragon, reflecting the chip’s continued advances in CPU performance, gaming, and faster on-device AI. This has also created a familiar imbalance in global markets, where some customers get the faster Snapdragon version while others get the Exynos.

Whether this strategy meaningfully reduces costs or offsets Samsung’s own chip development expenses is unclear. Given the company’s restructuring efforts and reported yield challenges, any short-term gains are likely to be limited.

To be clear, Exynos is not standing still. Its generational gain is really impressive, and the Exynos 2600 is by no means a slow chipset. But over the past five Galaxy generations, Samsung’s custom silicon has consistently lagged behind its nearest rivals (except Google’s Tensor). The move to AMD graphics doesn’t change that dynamic.

Instead, Exynos remains a strategic investment. This gives Samsung control over its own silicon roadmap, reduces reliance on external suppliers, and allows for deeper customization – whether it’s features like Heat Pass Block (HPB) technology for thermal management in the Arm SME2 or 2600 for AI. This could be an optimistic sign of things to come, we’ll just have to see what happens next when Samsung’s partnership with AMD finally kicks off.