Qualcomm today shared benchmark results for the Snapdragon 888 SoC that will be used in the flagship Android phones coming out in 2021, and it is unable to keep up with the A14 chip in the iPhone 12 models, nor the A13 in the iPhone 11.
AnandTech compared Qualcomm’s benchmarks with benchmarks of Apple’s devices, with the iPhone winning in the Geekbench 5 and GFXBench tests.
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The Snapdragon 888 chip achieved a single-core score of 1,135 and a multi-core score of 3,794, while the iPhone 12 Pro with A14 chip achieved a single-core score of 1,603 and a multi-core score of 4,187.
In the GFXBench test, which measures GPU performance, Samsung scored an 86 (in frames per second), compared to the iPhone 12 Pro’s 102.24. Sustained performance is not yet known and is dependent on chip power consumption, however AnandTech believes that the Snapdragon 888 could eventually beat the iPhone if power consumption is competitive.
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While the Snapdragon 888 doesn’t look like it matches the top performance ratings of the A13 or A14 SoCs used in Apple’s iPhones, sustained performance will depend quite a bit on the chip’s power consumption. If this hits between 4 and 4.5 W, the majority of flagship Android phones will likely be able to maintain this peak performance figure in 2021 and Qualcomm to reclaim Apple’s mobile performance crown. Otherwise, if the chip has to throttle significantly, 888 probably won’t recapture the crown. But even if it does, it shouldn’t matter too much to Android users: the generational jump over 2020 phones would still be huge, and by far one of the biggest GPU performance jumps Qualcomm has to date can achieve.
The Snapdragon 888 chip isn’t quite up to par with Apple’s A13 or A14 chips, but it’s a significant improvement over the previous generation Snapdragon chips used in current flagship Android smartphones. CPU performance is up 25 percent and GPU performance is up 35 percent.
AnandTech says that since these benchmarks were provided by Qualcomm and not obtained independently, we have to rely on Qualcomm’s figures to be accurate, but the site expects the figures to be “accurate and reproduced in commercial devices.”