Qualcomm doesn’t usually play coy, but their recent social media move says everything Samsung’s official announcement didn’t. When the chipmaker quoted Samsung’s Galaxy S26 launch teaser with “Something big is coming,” they weren’t being subtle. At least one phone in the February 25 lineup will run Snapdragon silicon.
Leaks suggest the Ultra gets the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 while the S26 and S26+ settle for Samsung’s Exynos 2600. It’s a familiar playbook, but this year the performance gap might actually matter.
Samsung built the Exynos 2600 on a 2nm process, technically ahead of Qualcomm’s 3nm node. But smaller doesn’t always mean faster. Qualcomm’s eight cores hit 4.74GHz at peak, nearly a full gigahertz faster than the Exynos flagship core’s 3.9GHz. Samsung counters with ten cores total, though two of those extra cores won’t compensate for raw clock speed in most tasks.
The GPU battle matters more for daily use. Qualcomm’s Adreno 840 has a track record. Samsung’s Xclipse 960 is unproven under sustained load.
Specs on paper don’t reflect throttling, battery drain, or how these chips handle an hour of video recording in direct sunlight. The Exynos has advantages in certain workloads, the Snapdragon in others. Which advantages actually improve your experience depends entirely on what you do with your phone.
Two weeks until we find out if Samsung’s chip gamble pays off or just creates an easier buying decision.
