Samsung may have hired Huawei veteran to lead Exynos 2600 GPU development

It's fair to say that Samsung's chip division has been struggling with the Exynos SoC for a while, in both performance and manufacturing output. But Samsung hasn't given up, and the company is now said to be working on the Exynos 2600 chip for an early 2026 debut.

The upcoming silicon will be equipped with an updated in-house GPU, and a recent intriguing rumor states that the person who leads the Exynos 2600 GPU project is a former Huawei veteran.

According to the rumor (via @Jukanlosreve), the person in charge of developing the next-gen GPU for the Exynos 2600 chip used to lead Huawei's GPU arm. No other details are known at the moment.

Samsung has been using in-house Xclipse GPUs for Exynos chips since the launch of the Exynos 2200 in 2022. The Exynos 2200 featured the Samsung-made Xclipse 920 GPU, which was based on the AMD RDNA 2 architecture.

The upcoming Exynos 2600 SoC is also expected to boast an in-house Xclipse GPU, except it will be newer and more powerful. The GPU's tentative name is Xclipse 960.

Do take this rumor with a pinch of salt for now. Apart from supposedly being an ex-Huawei GPU leader, any other information about the industry veteran who is supposedly in charge of Samsung's Xclipse 960 GPU team is presently unknown.

As for Huawei's past developments, the Chinese company has its own in-house chip division called HiSilicon. HiSilicon produces Kirin chips, the latest of which is the Kirin 9020. It features a HiSilicon Maleoon 920 GPU with a frequency of 840 MHz.

Samsung's upcoming Exynos 2600 SoC is rumored to power the Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26+. The next-gen phones are expected to be launched in early 2026. For more details, here's what we know about the S26 series so far.