Qualcomm has provided benchmarks for its flagship Snapdragon 888 system on a chip, and they show poor performance compared to the iPhone 12, and are even lost with older A13-powered iPhones.
Qualcomm announces its new processors every year in mid-December to prevent their arrival at products at CES. In 2020, the announcements were made online and the company provided the benchmarks.
The Snapdragon 888 performed well compared to the current range of Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, but did not surpass Apple’s latest iPhones. Even the line of last year’s iPhone 11 and the iPhone SE running the A13 processor outperformed the new Qualcomm processor.
Qualcomm uses some new and powerful technologies in its Snapdragon 888, which makes it a very competitive processor. It uses the Cortex-X1 as part of a design similar to the small one that implements the A14. The new SoC also includes the Adreno 660 GPU, which is expected to run 35% better than previous GPUs.
Anandtech received the parameters from Qualcomm and compared them with known scores from other products. The first is Geekbench 5, the well-known CPU benchmarking tool that provides scores for single-core and multi-core operation.
Geekbench 5 CPU benchmark Image Credit: AnandTech
The single-core score increased by approximately 23.5% year-on-year from 919 to 1135, which is timid for the iPhone 11 Pro running the A13, which scored 1,331. The multi-core score improved 16.9% to achieve a score of 3,794, which surpasses the A13 processor’s score of 3,366, but it doesn’t come close to the A14’s 4,187 score.
The GPU benchmark shows even less promising results. Using GFXBench results, Anandtech exposed the graphic scores of various products versus the new Snapdragon 888.
GFXBench graphic reference results Image credit: AnandTech
Scores are reported in maximum frames per second, and the Snapdragon 888 easily surpassed all Android flagships by up to 55%. This could be an anomaly, but it is what Qualcomm reported, which previously suggested that graphics improvements would be around 35%.
Compared to the iPhone 12 and iPhone 11 range, it didn’t turn out so well. It can be assumed that since these are the maximum results during the test, the Snapdragon may perform differently with an extended load, but these tests will have to wait until the reviewers reach the devices running the processor.
Qualcomm released other results, such as AI performance tests, but they are not comparable to iPhone processors. Apple has powerful neural motors in its A-Series chips, not to mention its M1 processor, but they haven’t been compared properly.