Apple A12 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 670

Apple A12 Bionic

The Apple A12 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone Xs and Xr. It was announced late 2018 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. Compared to the previous A11 Bionic, the A12 should offer a 15% improved CPU performance for the performance cores and a 50% lower power consumption for the efficiency cores (both according to Apple).

The chip also includes a new GPU that is advertised as 50% faster, the M12 Motion co-processor and a Neural Engine with 8 cores for up to 5 trillion operations per second.

With 6.9 billion transistors, the A12 Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion). Compared to the A11, the A12 integrates 60% more transistors.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 670

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 (SD670) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. Announced late 2018, the SD670 is the successor to the Snapdragon 660. It features 8 Kryo 360 cores (custom design, 64-Bit capable) that are divided in two clusters. A fast cluster of two cores with up to 2 GHz and a power saving efficiency cluster with up to 1.7 GHz. Both clusters can also used together.

In addition to the 8 CPU cores, the SoC integrates a mid range Adreno 616 GPU with a LPDDR4X-3733 memory controller (dual-channel 1867 MHz) and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac + MIMO, max. 867 Mbps), Bluetooth 5, and LTE (X12 LTE modem with up to 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload).

Performance

In Benchmarks the Snapdragon 670 is slightly faster than the old Snapdragon 660 and therefore a solid mid-range processor.

CPU

The Snapdragon 660 is based on a similar concept as ARM's big.LITTLE, which combines a low power CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 1.8 GHz) and a performance CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 2.2 GHz). The clock speed of each cluster can be individually adjusted (but not per core) and the lowest clock speed is 310 MHz (unverified).

Power Consumption

Thanks to the new 10 nm LPP process at Samsung, the energy efficiency has been improved noticeably compared to its 14 nm predecessors.