Apple A12 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 860

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 860

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 (SM8150-AC) Mobile Platform is a high-end smartphone and tablet SoC that Qualcomm announced in 2021. Compared to the old Snapdragon 855 Plus, the 860 is very similar and adds support for 16 GB RAM and a few camera features.

The SoC integrates a fast ‘Prime Core’ that clocks up to 2.96 GHz (up from 2.84 GHz in the 855) and three further fast ARM Cortex-A76 performance cores, which can reach up to 2.42 GHz. These are complemented by four power-saving ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clock up to a maximum of 1.8 GHz.

The SoC also integrates the X24 LTE modem that Qualcomm promises will deliver up to 2 Gbit/s maximum download speed over LTE Cat.20 and up to 316 Mbit/s upload speeds. The Snapdragon 860 can be configured with the company’s new X50 5G modem too (as an external chip).

The integrated Wi-Fi modem, which is Wi-Fi 6-ready, has 8x8 Sounding and supports up to 802.11 ay Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi modem can utilise the 60 GHz mmWave band for up to 10 Gbit/s internet speeds.

The Hexagon 690 DSP incorporates a neural processing unit (NPU) with dedicated Tensor-cores that can execute up to 7 trillion operations per second in conjunction with the CPU and GPU. In short, the Snapdragon 860 should be three times faster than the Snapdragon 845 and two times faster than the Kirin 980 SoC.

The Snapdragon 860 also has a Spectra 380 ISP onboard, which was the world’s first part to incorporate a Computer Vision Engine (CV-ISP) that can perform depth calculations in videos at up to 60 FPS. The Snapdragon 860 should deliver real-time portrait modes or be able to detect objects with relatively low power consumption.

The built-in memory controller supports up to 16 GB LPDDR4x RAM (4 x 16-bit). As the SD855 and 855+, the 860 integrates an Adreno 640 graphics card.

Qualcomm will manufacturer the Snapdragon 860 at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) using a 7 nm FinFET process.