Exynos 2600: The most anticipated success
The anticipation is over and the results are out , An all out one sided decimation by Exynos 2600
Three months after launch, we now know everything about Exynos 2600, and from the reliable results, it's a pretty one-sided win for the 2600.
From Gaming to Raw analysis, Exynos 2600 is always ahead. Exynos has gotten a lot of unjustified blind hate in the past, but looks like there is just nothing to hate 2600 for. Why? You may wonder.
The reason is simple Geekerwan's Exynos 2600 analysis showed the true hardware performance and efficiency of the 2600 compared to the competition, and it's better than expected.
CPU
Geekerwan
According to Geekerwan's sustained multi-core TDP graph, the Exynos 2600 has the highest performance per watt despite being the lowest clocked CPU, consuming 3 watts less than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to achieve the same score.
The sustained TDP of each processor during the Geekbench multi-core test.
Exynos 2600 = 16 watts
at ~12,000 MT
Snapdragon 8 elite gen 5 = 19 watts
at ~12,000 MT
Dimensity 9500 = 18 watts
at ~11,000 MT
Before Geekerwan, another tech creator named AAA魅魔荧师傅 (Bilibili) on Bilibili uploaded a performance-per-watt graph comparing the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and the Exynos 2600. In that graph, the Exynos 2600 showed a higher performance-per-watt than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
AAA魅魔荧师傅 (Bilibili)
Here is a simplified graph; in this graph, the Exynos 2600 delivers almost twice the performance of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 at sub-2 watts, which is impressive.
But what about the single-core performance?Well, the single-core is also very competitive in floating-point and SPECint tests.
Despite being clocked 0.93 GHz lower than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 0.41 GHz lower than the Dimensity 9500, it stays on the same level and slightly outperforms the Dimensity 9500 in SPECint.
The prime cores of all these processors have similar power consumption, yet the Exynos 2600 prime core has the highest IPC, trading blows with the Apple A19 Pro prime core.
According to David's test, the Exynos 2600 has higher CPU performance than the M3 Pro and higher CPU performance per clock than the M4 Pro in desktop (Linux) SPECint. The Exynos 2600 is only second to the M5 Pro in performance per clock in desktop benchmarks (3.13 vs. 3.34).
The Exynos 2600 CPU received a massive improvement over the Exynos 2500, and I hope to see this trend continue with the Exynos 2700.
GPU
Now, the GPU is where things get really interesting. The Dimensity 9500 leads the GPU graphs for both AAA魅魔荧师傅 and Geekerwan, with the Exynos 2600 following as a close second.
As you can see in both graphs, the Xclipse 960 outperforms the Adreno 840 while being more efficient and offering higher PPW. But in Geekerwan's graph, which uses a more accurate tool, the performance difference between the two is even larger. The Mali-G1 Ultra outperforms the Xclipse 960 for now, but that's only because Samsung hasn't released driver optimization updates for the Xclipse 960 yet. Once that update is out, the Xclipse 960 will easily outpace the Mali-G1 Ultra.
And because it's using RDNA4-based microarchitecture with 8WGPUs (16 CUs), the Xclipse 960 GPU is physically massive. It occupies 23% of the total die area, making it 46% larger than the GPU found in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (8EG5).
Compared to the Radeon 890 and Radeon 780, the Xclipse 960 (980 MHz) sits between them, outperforming the 780 (2700–3000 MHz) while being very close to the higher-clocked (2900 MHz) and higher-memory-bandwidth Radeon 890. This is very impressive as the Xclipse 960 is at less than 1/3rd of the clock and lower memory bandwidth compared to the others.
In 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme ray tracing, the Exynos 2600 has twice the performance of the Snapdragon Elite Gen 5.
GPU AI
The AI performance of Xclipse 960 is massively ahead of competition at 7 Tflops (6.98) in GPU FP32, which we leaked back in November of 2025 (though some questionable individuals called it fake, Geekerwan's analysis has proven us right). It's twice the performance of Adreno 840 (3.69 Tflops) and A19 pro (2.49 Tflops). Xclipse 960 also has 1 Tflop more than Radeon 890M (5.94 Tflop), which is AMD's top-tier and most powerful integrated GPU.
The ALU count is also industry-breaking at a massive 224 ALU, 96 ALU more than the industry-best consumer GPU, RTX 5090.
This is surely an industry engineering marvel.
Geekerwan has highlighted that Samsung has removed the smart part of the hardware from the RDNA4 IP, which is no WMMA units, can't run BF16/FP8/INT8 ops, and would not be able to effectively run an FP8 FSR4 upscaler, but that's not a wrong move as it does not apply to Android graphically (basically useless hardware for Android).
According to my specialist luancastro_lc, Samsung took the AI part out of the RDNA because Android doesn't use it... plus it already has a logical part just for that.
Samsung has replaced it with their proprietary AI hardware and accelerators and their own in-house ENSS upscaling technology.
NPU
What's better than 1 NPU? 2 NPUs. Exynos 2600 has 2 NPUs.
Kurnal
Exynos 2600 has the largest NPU among the competition.
ISP
The Exynos ISP still remains the industry-best smartphone ISP.
Modem and Battery Life in S26
Now the modem is where it's confusing. On some test Exynos variants outperforms Snapdragon, while in others it's the opposite.
The Exynos variant outperforms the Snapdragon variant in this test.
The opposite is the case in this test.
This disparity can be attributed to the difference of SIMs.
But so far, reliable tests have shown the Exynos 2600 has superior efficiency, and the modem issue is also fixed.
Moving on to.
Stability and Thermals
This is a pretty one-sided match. Exynos outperforms the 8 Elite Gen 5 in stability and thermals, thanks to HPB.
Geekerwan
In Geekerwan's test, the Exynos 2600 with a clip-on fan outperformed the 8 Elite Gen 5 with liquid nitrogen cooling in peak clock speed stability.And in real life, the Exynos 2600 CPU with the smaller vapor chamber of the S26+ is more stable than the 8 Elite Gen 5 with the bigger and better vapor chamber of the S26 Ultra.
Now onto the downside and negetive aspects
First of all, I want to highlight the lack of BCn 4 to 7 hardware in the 2600, which will affect current game emulation that uses BCn 4 to 7 texture decompression. But I have got a tip from a reliable person that Exynos 2800 will support all BCn 1 to 7 hardware.
And second is the lack of RADV-based drivers, which makes it a bit harder for emulation devs to optimize for Xclipse.
Third one is very bad and causes excessive battery drain, sustaining up to peaks of 30 watts on Exynos variants of S26.
As highlighted by Geekerwan, improper CPU core scheduling on One UI is very bad, and One UI does not properly utilize the full deca-core CPU of the 2600, causing worse performance in games and more battery drain. Samsung should address this scheduling issue soon or copy the core parking method from desktop. (Core parking is a power-saving feature in modern operating systems, like Windows 10 and 11, that temporarily 'shuts down' or puts idle CPU cores into a low-power sleep state when your computer isn't under heavy load.)
Another issue highlighted by luancastro_lc is sustaining peaks of up to 30 watts. This is happening due to the outdated power cap algorithm of Samsung, which relies on temperature and is not tuned for HPB chips like the 2600. And because 2600 cooling is very fast due to HPB, it causes huge spikes as the software gets confused, aka useless boosting for no reason.
Here is an example from luancastro_lc.
As you can see, the CPU clock is 3264 MHz, but observe the consumption when Luancastro_lc locks the clock at 1632 MHz. The FPS is also unaffected because One UI was unnecessarily boosting twice more than the required resource.
This is poorly adjusted scheduler behavior and is a software issue which can be fixed with an update, as seen with the Exynos 2400, which also had the same CPU scheduling issues, but today it is perfect.
Samsung must fix this issue and update their power capping algorithm.
The Memmory bandwidth issue fir GPU
Despite the very strong GPU, it is getting bottlenecked by the memory bandwidth and L2 cache because the memory bandwidth is 64-bit compared to the 128-bit in Radeon 890, and the L2 cache is 2 MB. It's only enough for the Xclipse 960 GPU to run at low frequency.
Even though the Xclipse 2600 has greater computing power, it will be limited by the bandwidth of the memory, ending up being the same as the other SoCs. But this signals something more interesting: only the memory bandwidth limits it. That means the 2600 was designed for a laptop and smartphone simultaneously. It appears as though Samsung is laying the foundation for the Exynos to enter the desktop market and power laptops and Chromebooks.
One thing these results highlight is believing the improper and unprofessional testing of the processor, especially from the likes of Techstation365, who shared shady results and did improper, unqualified tests is harmful.
For someone who calls himself 'TechStation,' he has fairly outlandish takes, like calling overprocessed AI smoothing of texture in a photo better than actual natural photography.
Bonus gaming Comparison from NL tech
And Emulation From luancastro_lc
The Witcher 3 Next Gen
720p - Low
Exy 2600 102 vs 8Elite 79fps
Exynos had about 30% more FPS in the same energy consumption.
The Exynos 2600's huge performance and efficiency improvement in a single gen is extremely impressive while also outperforming the competition. We hope Samsung continues this trend with the Exynos 2700 and applies improvements on it. Especially with SBS and HPB, the thermals should not be an issue, and as the foundry is back to being good with yield, the Exynos 2700 is certainly going to be an industry lead again.
And let's hope Samsung fixes all the issues with One UI in a future update.
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