DealNTech Mobiles, PCs, and All Things Tech
We have seen the performance of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 on several flagship phones, such as Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro, OnePlus 9 Pro, and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. Now, Apple has unveiled its flagship chipset to power its iPhone 13 lineup, dubbed the Apple A15 Bionic. They are great competitors in terms of CPU, GPU, etc. So we have made a detailed comparison of both flagship processors so that you can find out their pros and cons.
Apple A15 Bionic vs Snapdragon 888
Manufacturing Process
The Snapdragon 888 is built on Samsung’s 5nm process and is manufactured using 5LPE technology. On the other hand, Apple’s A15 Bionic chip is also built on a 5nm node. However, we expect it will be on the new TSMC’s N5P node, an iteration of last year’s N5 node. Since the size of both chipsets is small, the transistor count will be high, and also it will have higher power efficiency. The A15 Bionic has 15 billion transistors. There is no word about the Snapdragon 888’s transistor count. It looks like both chipsets will likely be equally efficient. However, it will be exciting to see both in real-life uses.
CPU
Snapdragon 888 packs an octa-core setup with a 1+3+4 configuration. The main core is the all-new Cortex-X1 (clocked at up to 2.84 GHz), followed by three performance cores of Cortex-A78 (run at 2.42 GHz) and four power-efficiency cores of Cortex-A55 (clocked at 1.80 GHz).
On the other hand, the Apple A15 Bionic processor has a Hexa-core (2+4) configuration with 2 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores. Apple has not revealed the frequency of the A15 chip. But Geekbench suggests a max CPU clock speed of 3.23 GHz, 390 MHz higher than Snapdragon 888. It should be noted that the A15 chip for iPad Mini 6th Gen has a max CPU clock speed of 2.93 GHz.
Apple claims the A15 will be +50% better than the next-best competitor (Snapdragon 888 or 888+?).
GPU
Regarding GPU, the Snapdragon 888 packs the Adreno 660 with 840 MHz frequency. This GPU is manufactured to provide gaming at high frame rates and lower latency. On the other hand, the Apple A15 Bionic SoC packs a four-core GPU for iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, while its 5-core GPU is designed for iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max. The company said the A15 chipset’s GPU performance is 50% better with 5-cores and 30% better with 4-cores than the next-best competitor. We believe that “Competitor” represents the Snapdragon 888 or 888+, which are at the top of Android.
AI Performance
Qualcomm Snapdragon 888’s Hexagon 780 DSP and the 6th generation Qualcomm AI Engine offer 26 trillion operations per second (TOPS) AI performance, the highest on any mobile. The A15 Bionic processor features a faster Neural Engine with a 16-core architecture that delivers up to 15.8 trillion operations per second (TOPS) AI performance. So we can see that the Snapdragon 888 SoC can offer better AI performance than the A15 Bionic chipset.
Which One is Better?
Both processors are powerful, but the Apple A15 Bionic is better in all terms. We have already seen “A14 Bionic chip beats Snapdragon 888″. So, the Apple A15 Bionic will still hold the top spot for the most powerful smartphone chipset. You can see the Geekbench 5 benchmark test result below:
Single-Core score
- A15 Bionic = 1734
- Snapdragon 888 = 1140
A15 Bionic has a 52% advantage over Snapdragon 888 in the single-core test.
Multi-Core Score
- A15 Bionic = 4818
- Snapdragon 888 = 3828
A15 Bionic has a 25% advantage over Snapdragon 888 in the multi-core test.
