The Snapdragon 888 is much better and will give the Apple A14 competition
Share onApple's A chips, and the new M1 chips for Mac, based on ARM, are so fast that we fear that the competition will suffer. At the same time, it is known that Microsoft is supposedly developing its own ARM chips for server environments, and we believe and hope that what they learn will be transferred to consumer products.
The CPU performance of the Snapdragon 888 is up 25 percent - the GPU 35 percent
Because neither Microsoft, Intel nor Qualcomm has a chance against Apple at the moment, and we are talking about such big differences that it is difficult to imagine that it will improve in the first place. Yes, the differences are so great that we fear that there will be no healthy competition in the future.
Apple's A14 has just been launched as part of the new iPhone 12 series and is also in the iPad Air 4. Now Qualcomm is responding with their new Snapdragon 888 and has revealed that the performance of the new processors has been drastically improved. In particular, the performance of the GPU housed in the Snapdragon 888 has experienced a sharp jump in performance.
Qualcomm impresses with far better GPU performance, although Apple still leads
AnandTech has compared the two pieces in GeekBench 5 and GFXBench after Qualcomm today revealed the performance of its new flagship, Snapdragon 888.
Ultimately, Android top mobiles are unlikely to experience much slower use, if at all. There is also something about the fact that Apple is not kings of battery life, especially not with the iPhone 12 series. Instead, they seem to prefer raw performance.
If the Snapdragon 888 proves to be energy efficient and has a power consumption of between 4 and 4.5 W, next year's flagship will be able to maintain the performance we see in today's tests and at the same time have good battery life. For many, battery life is as important as raw performance, and perhaps Apple should have downgraded its clock speeds to save power.
Almost 10 percent faster
What is revealed is not surprising, ie that Apple beats Qualcomm in GeekBench, but there are no big differences: only a few hundred points separate the iPhone 12 Pro in the multi-core test.
The iPhone 12 gets a score of 4187 in the multi-core test, while the Snapdragon 888 gets 3794. That gives a difference of almost 9.4 percent.
iPhone 12 also wins in the GPU test, but Qualcomm should have praised how much they have improved performance: The Adreno 660 GPU that sits in the Snapdragon 888 performs up to 35 and 55 percent better than its predecessor.
In the single-core test, the Snapdragon 888 gets a score of 1135 which makes it the first processor for Android to get a score above 1000. In comparison, the Note 20 Ultra with the Snapdragon 865+ got a score of 983. It gives a performance increase of 23.5 percent which is in line with Qualcomm's praise for a 25 percent performance increase.
But the iPhone 12 gets a score of 1603 and in other words, does much better in the single-core test than the Snapdragon 888. In fact, the previous generation iPhone with the A13 also beats the Snapdragon 888 with a score of 1331. The core performance is often what counts in normal daily use, while multi-core performance strikes when running heavier tasks. Either way, Apple is doing better.
Snapdragons 888 has also upgraded the chip for artificial intelligence which in some tests seems to be up to 3 times faster than the previous generation. Tasks that require fast artificial intelligence are more nuanced and varied and therefore it is more difficult to compare the two processors in this area.
But if you look at raw processing power, everything points to the fact that the Snapdragon 888 has much faster handling of KI than the A14. How fast Snapdragon 888 will be in use and especially how power efficient it will be, when the flagship with the processor comes on the market next year, will be exciting to see.