Samsung’s next flagship chip appears to drop efficiency cores altogether. A leaked die shot of the Exynos 2700, published by chip analysis firm SemiAnalysis, shows a 10-core CPU built around two prime cores and eight mid-tier cores, with none of the small low-power cores that have anchored Android chips for a decade. Treat this as a leak: Samsung has not announced the part, and the analysis rests on an annotated floorplan rather than a datasheet.
What the Exynos 2700 die shot shows
The chip is expected to power the Galaxy S27 and Galaxy S27+ in early 2027. Its CPU layout, as read off the die shot, breaks down like this:
- 2x Arm C2 Ultra prime cores — one at 4.24GHz, the second at 3.36GHz
- 4x Arm C2 Pro cores at 3.74GHz
- 4x Arm C2 Pro cores at 2.88GHz
- Cache — 24MB system-level cache shared across the chip, plus four 4MB L3 banks for the CPU, for 40MB combined
- GPU — Xclipse 970 with eight workgroup processors, 16 compute units in total
- Memory — four 64-bit LPDDR6 interfaces
- Process — Samsung Foundry’s second-generation 2nm node, SF2P
Why two prime cores and no efficiency cores matters
The Exynos 2600 relied on a single prime core. Dropping the efficiency tier entirely is the structural change here, and a two-prime-core layout is closer to how Apple builds its A-series chips than to how Qualcomm or MediaTek build theirs.
That has a plain consequence for a buyer. On a phone, most of the day is spent on background work: notifications, sync, music, a locked screen. Efficiency cores exist to handle that at minimal power draw. If they are gone, the burden falls on the 2.88GHz C2 Pro cluster, and whether that costs battery life depends entirely on how far down those cores can clock and how well the 2nm process holds up. Nobody outside Samsung can answer that from a die photo. It is the single number worth waiting for.
The second prime core running at 3.36GHz rather than 4.24GHz is a related signal. Samsung appears to be using it as a middle rung, a core that handles sustained work without waking the fastest one.
The modem is still a separate chip
The die shot shows no integrated modem, which matches the Exynos 2600. Samsung will pair the chip with a discrete 5G modem, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and NFC will likely sit on separate silicon too. That is one more component drawing power alongside the main chip, and on this point the 2700 changes nothing from its predecessor.
For context on the cache figure, 40MB puts the Exynos 2700 above the 24MB in MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and below the 54MB in Apple’s A19 Pro. Cache size is not performance, though, and none of the layout detail here tells you how the chip behaves in a phone. Samsung’s own internal benchmark numbers leaked last month, and as we noted then, a company grading its own unreleased silicon is not evidence of anything.
Source: SemiAnalysis, via SamMobile
