Samsung starts mass producing Exynos 2700 chip, Galaxy S27 Ultra decision still up in the air

Samsung has begun mass production of the Exynos 2700 chipset, according to Korean publication The Elec. The company has reportedly set the production target “more than 10% higher” than the Exynos 2600 target to account for the new addition to the S-series family – the Galaxy S27 Pro.

The Samsung Galaxy S27 Pro – along with the vanilla and plus models – will use the Exynos 2700 in Korea and Europe. These models will switch to a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip for the US and China.

As for the Galaxy S27 Ultra, that one is still up in the air. Samsung System LSI, which designs the Exynos chips, has confidence in the 2700 and is pushing to get it adopted on the top-tier S-phone. This would help the division’s earnings, of course, but it will also signal that the chip is good enough for an Ultra-class flagship.

Samsung MX, the division building the phones, has the final say, however. Right now it is considering multiple factors – benchmark and thermal performance as well as the price of Qualcomm’s chips and the production capacity for Exynos 2700 chips.

A while back, the news came out that internal testing had shown that the Exynos 2700 beats the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 on the multi-core Geekbench test by 9.5%. However, the Snapdragon still has the edge in the single-core test.

The Exynos 2700 will be fabbed on Samsung’s SF2P, a second generation 2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) node. Compared to the first-gen node (SF2), which was used for the Exynos 2600, SF2P offers a 12% performance improvement, a 25% reduction in power usage and an 8% decrease in chip area. There will be some architectural improvements too, of course, with the Exynos 2700 likely using Arm C2 CPU cores (the 2600 used C1 cores).

Apparently, it takes three-four months from the moment a chipset goes into mass production to having the final product ready. The timing works out just right for a February or March launch of the Galaxy S27 series.