Apple A11 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 850

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 850

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Mobile Compute Platform (or SD850) is a ARM based SoC for Windows laptops. It is a higher clocked version (3 versus 2.8 GHz) of the Snapdragon 845 for smartphones and also manufactured in 10 nm LPP FinFET at TSMC. It integrates 4x Kryo 385 cores (Cortex-A75) at up to 2.95 GHz (max) for performance and 4x Kryo 385 (at 1.8 GHz?) for efficiency. Furthermore offers an X20 LTE modem (Cat. 18 1.2 Gbps downlink, Cat 13 150 Mbps uplink), ac-WiFi and a dual-channel 32-Bit 1866 MHz LPDDR4x memory controller.

The performance of the Snapdragon 850 in Windows is in theory similar to a Intel Core i5 of the Y-series (e.g. Core i5-7y54). However, this is only the case for native ARM64 compiled applications and games. 32-bit applications that are not compiled for the ARM architecture only run in an emulation and perform much worse (e.g. see Cinebench R11.5 benchmark). 64-bit Intel/AMD apps are not supported at all.

The chip is very power efficient as its produced at TSMC in the modern 10nm LPP process. Therefore, laptops using the Snapdragon 850 can be passively cooled (no fan) and should not throttle under constant load.