Samsung Galaxy S26 with Exynos 2600 shows many disadvantages compared to Snapdragon

After the Samsung Galaxy S25 was delivered worldwide with a Snapdragon chip, Samsung is falling back into old patterns with the Galaxy S26 ($899 on Amazon) and the Galaxy S26+. This is because the flagship smartphones are delivered in Europe with a Samsung Exynos 2600, but in most other regions including the USA and China with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

The fact that the Exynos processor has disadvantages despite advanced 2 nm production has already been demonstrated by a battery comparison test in which the US version of the Galaxy S26 lasted almost three hours longer at 09:26 hours. Despite higher power consumption, the Exynos 2600 is slower, as Geekbench shows. The Galaxy S26 with Exynos 2600 achieves 3,085 points (single-thread) and 10,484 points (multi-thread). The Snapdragon version achieves a 19.2 percent and 6.5 percent higher CPU performance with 3,677 points and 11,163 points respectively.

The comparison test on the YouTube channel Techmo shows that even the AMD Radeon-based graphics chip cannot quite keep up with the fastest smartphone processor from Qualcomm, as Qualcomm takes a 9 percent lead with 7,786 points in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme. In AnTuTu v11, the Galaxy S26 with Snapdragon is 20.4 percent ahead. In the gaming test, the Snapdragon version achieves a more stable frame rate and still runs 1.3 °C cooler with a similar power consumption. In this YouTuber's battery comparison, the European version of the Galaxy S26 does not perform quite as badly as in the last comparison, but overall everything currently indicates that customers from Europe will once again get the worse version of Samsung's flagship smartphone