The yearly Exynos versus Snapdragon debate usually ends with the same advice: if you can, get the Snapdragon model. Regional chip splitting has left Samsung’s in-house processor with a reputation problem. Heat throttling, battery drain, and performance gaps have made the Exynos variants feel like second-tier phones wearing flagship price tags.
This year could be different, and not because Samsung finally solved its thermal issues (though the new Heat Path Block design is meant to help). The Exynos 2600 brings something Qualcomm hasn’t shipped yet: truly offline AI image generation that works in under a second.
Most AI features on phones today lean heavily on cloud servers. You type a prompt, watch a loading spinner, wait ten to fifteen seconds, and hope your connection holds. Samsung’s partnership with Nota AI changes that equation. EdgeFusion, a stripped-down version of Stable Diffusion optimized specifically for the 2nm Exynos chip, runs entirely on the device. No internet required.
The practical advantage isn’t just speed. Cloud-based generation fails in airplane mode, struggles with spotty coverage, and sends your prompts to remote servers. Local processing keeps everything private and available regardless of connectivity.
Samsung built the Exynos 2600 on a 2nm manufacturing process, beating Apple, Qualcomm, and Google to that node size. The 10-core CPU drops traditional low-power cores in favor of mid-tier and high-performance options, with the prime core hitting 3.8GHz. Early benchmarks show roughly 39% faster CPU performance and double the GPU power compared to last year’s Exynos 2500.
EdgeFusion generates 512×512 pixel images in what Nota AI claims is under a second. That puts it well ahead of current tools like Google’s Pixel Studio, which routinely takes ten seconds or more for simple prompts. Whether it holds up under real-world use with complex requests remains to be seen, but the starting point is promising.
The Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus will ship with Exynos 2600 in most markets outside North America and China. The S26 Ultra gets Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 globally. Whether EdgeFusion will work on Snapdragon variants hasn’t been confirmed, which could leave buyers in certain regions with genuinely different capabilities rather than just minor performance variations.
Samsung’s launch is expected February 25. If EdgeFusion delivers as advertised, it might finally give Exynos models a legitimate selling point instead of an apology.
Via – Android Authority
