At its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, Qualcomm announced its newest premium smartphone processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, but how does it compare to Apple's A15? The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the successor to the Snapdragon 888, although with a different naming convention after Qualcomm decided to ditch its triple-digit numbering system in favor of "a single-digit series and generation number."
The latest mobile chip from Qualcomm is expected to power most of the flagship smartphones in 2022, including Samsung's Galaxy S22. In contrast, Apple's A15 Bionic succeeds the A14 Bionic as the processor of choice in the company's new iPad and iPhone 13 lineups. The A15 brings several upgrades over its predecessor, even though the extent of improvement is not as great as it was the year before with the A14. Still, now that its new Qualcomm competitor is official, it it's worth taking a closer look at the specs to see which has the upper hand as of now.
The A15 Bionic is built using TSMC's N5P fabrication process, which is a 5nm node. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, however, is built on Samsung's newer 4nm process node, which gives it an immediate advantage in terms of power efficiency and thermal optimization. The Qualcomm SoC comes with new Armv9 Cortex CPU cores and a next-generation Adreno GPU that Qualcomm says offers a 30-percent boost in graphics rendering capabilities. There's also an improved Qualcomm Spectra ISP that supports 8K HDR video capture, an upgraded Hexagon NPU/DSP with a 2x faster tensor accelerator than the Snapdragon 888, and an integrated X65 5G modem with up to 10Gbps download speeds. As for Apple's chip, it has an integrated five-core Apple GPU (four-core in some iPhone models) clocked at up to 1.2GHz, a powerful 16-core neural engine that can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, and a new ISP that supports 4K/60FPS videos.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 And A15 Bionic Head-To-Head
Delving into the core architecture of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, it is Qualcomm’s first chip featuring the new Armv9 generation of CPU IPs. The SoC comes with an integrated octa-core CPU with 1x Cortex-X2 core clocked at 3.0GHz. Alongside that, there are 3x Cortex-X710 cores clocked at up to at 2.5GHz. Finally, there are 4x Cortex-A510 cores at 1.8GHz. Overall, Qualcomm claims that the new chip will offer up to 20-percent better performance and up to 30-percent more power efficiency over the Snapdragon 888 and 888+. In comparison, the Apple A15 Bionic has a hexa-core CPU based on the ARMv8.5-A instruction set and uses 15 billion transistors. It comes with 2x high-performance Avalanche cores clocked at 3.24GHz and 4x energy-efficient Blizzard cores clocked at up to 2.01GHz. The company claims that the chip offers a 40-percent jump in CPU performance and an 80-percent increase in graphics performance in the iPad mini when compared to the previous A12-powered model.
Qualcomm's latest chipset has only just been announced and there are no reliable real-world benchmarks yet to compare it to the competition. However, given that the A14 Bionic is significantly faster than the Snapdragon 888 in most real-world applications, it will be interesting to see how much ground the new Snapdragon chip has made up over the past year. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen-1 SoC promises to offer the best performance for flagship Android devices in 2022, but only time (and real-world tests) will determine whether it actually will be able to compete on even terms with Apple's A15 Bionic.