Apple A15 Bionic vs Snapdragon 888: Which One is Better?
We have seen the performance of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 on several flagship phones such as Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro, OnePlus 9 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. Now Apple has unveiled their flagship chipset to power its iPhone 13 lineup, dubbed as 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.
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- iOS 16 features leaked.
Apple A15 Bionic vs Snapdragon 888
Manufacturing Process
The Snapdragon 888 is built on a 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, which is 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 Snapdragon 888’s transistor count. It looks 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 set up 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 which is 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 that the A15 will be +50% better than the next-best competitor (Snapdragon 888 or 888+?).
GPU
In terms of GPU, Snapdragon 888 packs the Adreno 660 with 840 MHz frequency. This GPU is manufactured in such a way that it can 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 that 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” represent 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 together offers 26 trillion operations per second (TOPS) AI performance which is the highest on any mobile. The A15 Bionic processor features a faster Neural Engine with 16-core architecture that delivers upto 15.8 trillion operations per second (TOPS) AI performance. So we can see Snapdragon 888 SoC can offer better AI performance than the A15 Bionic chipset.
Which One is Better?
Both processors are powerful, but Apple A15 Bionic is quite 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 when it comes to the most powerful smartphone chipset. You can see 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.
