Samsung bet big on AMD for Exynos — here’s how it’s actually working out

Samsung’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.

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.

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.

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

Looking at MediaTek’s Dimensity 9200 (with Immortalis-G715) through to the Dimensity 9500, Samsung’s early ray-tracing lead quickly evaporated. The Exynos 2200, despite launching first, is about 33% behind the Dimensity 9200 in ray tracing performance in 3DMark’s Solar Bay test — though the timing gap makes that comparison slightly unfair.

This comparison points to the missing piece: 2023’s canceled Exynos 2300. Based on the trendline we’ve drawn, it likely would have been highly competitive, but performance issues kept it from ever shipping. As things stand, Arm’s Immortalis GPUs now consistently outperform Exynos in the very area AMD was supposed to dominate. The Exynos 2600, for example, trails the Dimensity 9500 by around 9% in this ray tracing test.

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

That gap is actually wider than the previous dual-chip Galaxy S generations, which isn’t a great look for Samsung’s flagship chipset. Perhaps price, area, and power considerations have still made this switch worthwhile from Samsung’s perspective, but from a gaming perspective, AMD’s Xclipse hasn’t delivered a clear advantage.

None of this will come as a surprise to longtime Samsung followers. A decade ago, Exynos and Snapdragon were genuine peers, but more recently, Snapdragon has pulled ahead — and stayed there.

Even when Exynos has appeared in newer Galaxy S models, it’s effectively become the second-tier option. Samsung’s Ultra models have gone Snapdragon-only, reflecting the chip’s consistent lead in CPU performance, gaming, and increasingly, on-device AI. This has also created a familiar imbalance across global markets, where some customers get the faster Snapdragon variant while others receive Exynos.

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

To be clear, Exynos hasn’t stood still. Its generational gains are genuinely impressive, and the Exynos 2600 is by no means a slow chipset. But across the past five Galaxy generations, Samsung’s custom silicon has consistently trailed its closest rivals (Google’s Tensor aside). The move to AMD graphics hasn’t changed that dynamic either.

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