Apple A11 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+ 5G

Apple A11 Bionic

The Apple A11 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X. It was announced late 2017 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. In comparison to the A10X all 6 cores can be used at once, leading to a much higher theoretical performance. In our benchmarks the SoC however is not only faster in multi threaded tests (+77% versus A10 Fusion in Geekbench), but also in single threaded tests (+19%). Apple states 25% more performance compared to the A10 in the iPhone 7.

With 4.3 Billion transistors, the A11 Bionic is a rather big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion).

Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+ 5G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+ 5G (SDM778G Plus 5G Mobile Platform) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. It integrates eight cores (octa-core) divided into two clusters. A fast performance cluster with four cores based on the ARM Cortex-A78 architecture with up to 2.5 GHz and a power efficiency cluster with four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.9 GHz. Depending on the workload only single clusters or all cores can run at different clock speeds. Compared to the older non-plus variant, the 778G+ offers 100 MHz higher clocked CPU cores.

Thanks to the new Cortex-A78 cores, the CPU performance increases by up to 40% compared to the old Snapdragon 768G according to Qualcomm. In our benchmarks, the 778G+ is able to reach the performance of the old high end chip Kirin 990. 

The integrated X53 5G modem supports up to 3.3 Gbps with sub 6Ghz. The FastConnect 6900 Wi-Fi modem supports the current Wi-Fi 6e standard with 6GHz.

The integrated Qualcomm Adreno 642L offers a 40% higher performance compared to the old Adreno 620 in the predecessor. This is partly thanks to the fast memory controller with LPDDR5-3200 support.

The integrated 6th gen AI engine called Hexagon 770 offers a 2x improvement and up to 12 TOPS of performance. The Spectra 570 ISP (image signal processor) supports up to three cameras. The satellite system supports all major standards like Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS and GPS.

The G specifies an optimized SoC for gaming and e.g. Qualcomm offers updates for the graphics driver.

The Snapdragon 778G Plus is manufactured in the modern 6 nm process at TSMC (vs the 5LPE of the 780G).