Samsung Galaxy S26 with Exynos Chip Has Shorter Battery Life Compared to Qualcomm—But Why?

There are multiple variants of Samsung's flagship smartphone model, but the Galaxy S26 alone features two versions because of the different chipsets used: the Exynos and the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips.

However, in a recent test, it was found that a Galaxy S26 with the latest Exynos chipset performed worse, more particularly with a poor battery life compared to one equipped with a third-party processor.

Samsung Galaxy S26 with Exynos Chip Has Poor Battery Life

According to DigitalTrends, a YouTube channel called Android Addicts recently conducted a test featuring two identical versions of the Galaxy S26 smartphone. One uses the world's first 2nm Exynos 2600 chip, while other uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

There are different kinds of processes run on both smartphones, and these include one-hour phone calls, 4K video recording, streaming, game benchmarks, navigation, and social media use, with the WiFi turned off and 5G in use.

The Galaxy S26's two versions were stress-tested to determine how long its batteries would last, and the demonstration saw that the one equipped with the Exynos 2600 chip gave out earlier, lasting only six hours and 48 minutes.

On the other hand, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 lasted up to nine hours and 26 minutes, which is around two-and-a-half hours more in real-world usage or around 28%.

S26 Exynos Chip: Poor Efficiency vs. S26 with Snapdragon

The result was a shocking one for the first-ever 2nm chipset in history as it is expected to be more efficient, powerful, and long-lasting compared to the Qualcomm version, which used the 3nm architecture from TSMC.

It is also important to note that Samsung designed the Exynos 2600 chipset for the S26 series, so it was expected to perform better than the third-party option, but the real-world usage test showed otherwise.

The Exynos 2600 chip reportedly drew 30W under peak load, which is around 40% higher than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5's 21W maximum for the same multi-core output.

This power tends to heat the processor and leads to a drop in efficiency as it draws more power from the battery.