Samsung’s upcoming Exynos 2600 is being positioned as a major milestone: the company’s first 2nm GAA smartphone chipset, built on an advanced manufacturing process that should, in theory, bring higher performance and better power efficiency than previous generations. But early benchmark comparisons suggest the reality may be more complicated—especially when it comes to power draw.
In a series of tests run on three flagship phones (including the base Galaxy S26) by YouTube channel TechStation365, the Exynos 2600 was compared against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. Two results stood out: Geekbench 6 and a large-file decompression workload using a 20GB zip file.
The headline problem for Samsung is peak power. In Geekbench 6, the Exynos 2600 reportedly surged to 30.22W at its peak. That’s a startling number for a smartphone chip—closer to what you’d expect during short boosts on some thin-and-light notebooks than a handset. Even if that spike lasts only a couple of seconds, it raises concerns about real-world sustained performance, heat, and throttling under heavier workloads such as extended gaming, long camera sessions, or repeated AI tasks.
What makes the result more concerning is that Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 delivered similar performance while consuming far less power. Qualcomm’s chip peaked at 21.48W in the same test, meaning the Exynos 2600 used about 40.69 percent more power to land slightly behind on performance.
Here’s how the Geekbench 6 numbers reportedly break down:
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Single-core: 3,641
Multi-core: 10,902
Peak power draw: 21.48W
Exynos 2600
Single-core: 3,271 (about 10.16 percent slower)
Multi-core: 10,745 (about 1.14 percent slower)
Peak power draw: 30.22W (about 40.69 percent higher)
Snapdragon 8 Gen 5
Single-core: 2,904
Multi-core: 9,443
Peak power draw: 21.89W
So why would a next-generation 2nm GAA chipset draw that much power in a synthetic CPU benchmark? There isn’t a definitive explanation yet, but the testing discussion points to a couple of possibilities. One is that the Exynos 2600’s CPU configuration—reported to feature 10 cores—may be tuned aggressively to chase multi-core performance, and that extra parallelism needs more power when all cores ramp together. Another possibility is that Geekbench 6 pushes chips into maximum boost behavior, forcing very high frequencies and voltage to hit peak scores. Either way, the end result is the same: efficiency doesn’t look competitive in this early data.
The decompression test paints an even clearer picture of efficiency problems. While unpacking a 20GB zip file, the Exynos 2600 reached up to 13W peak power consumption. Meanwhile, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 reportedly stayed under 5W. Even more telling, the Exynos 2600 reportedly needed around 63 percent more power in this workload and still took slightly longer to finish than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
After running multiple passes and averaging the outcomes, TechStation365 described the situation as the Exynos 2600 being “power starved,” suggesting those 10 CPU cores may require more power than expected to sustain their best performance.
For consumers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: if these numbers hold up across broader testing, phones powered by Exynos 2600—such as certain Galaxy S26 variants—could face greater challenges with heat, battery life, and performance consistency during long sessions, even if short burst performance looks close to the best from Qualcomm.
It’s still early, and benchmark behavior can vary based on firmware, thermal tuning, and pre-release optimization. But the current comparison indicates that Samsung’s latest mobile chipset may not yet be delivering the efficiency leap many would expect from a first-generation 2nm GAA design. Attention now shifts to whether Samsung can refine this platform through updates—or whether a future Exynos 2700 will better balance performance with power consumption.
