Harsh reality for 2nm: Samsung Galaxy S26 on Exynos 2600 performs worse than the version with Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 for Galaxy

Immediately after the official announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S26 series, the results of the first real comparative tests of Exynos 2600 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 for Galaxy appeared online.

Recall, Exynos 2600 is the world's first 2nm mobile processor with radically improved cooling, whereas Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 for Galaxy is an exclusive modification of Qualcomm's flagship processor.

In preliminary tests and theoretical calculations, the new Exynos easily outperformed the Snapdragon in performance, but reality turned out differently.

What is known

In Korea, Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26+ are available on both Snapdragon and Exynos 2600, but the global version of the Galaxy S26 series is offered exclusively on Snapdragon, but it seems this is no reason to be upset, as the mega-chipset from Samsung does not show itself in the best light.

The first performance measurements showed that a miracle did not happen: the new Exynos again falls short of Qualcomm's flagship processor.

In a single-core test, Exynos 2600 scored 3105 points, while in multi-core it scored 10,444 points. For comparison, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 showed 3670 and 10,981 points respectively. The difference is 18.2% in single-core mode and 5.1% in multi-core mode, which confirms Qualcomm's actual advantage.

At the same time, in the graphical part, Samsung managed to reduce the gap: the GPU in Exynos 2600 finally approached Qualcomm chips, but this is not the merit of the Korean company, but of AMD, which participated in the development of the graphics architecture for Samsung chips. Nevertheless, the overall performance balance remains in favor of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5, making the Galaxy S26 Ultra the most powerful device in the lineup, as it is only available on this chipset, although an undeniable advantage of Exynos 2600 is its cooling system.

Source: WCCftech