Apple A13 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ (Plus)

Apple A13 Bionic

The Apple A13 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 11 series. It was announced late 2019 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. Compared to the previous A12 Bionic, the A13 should offer a 20% improved CPU performance at 40% lower power (according to Apple).

With 8.5 billion transistors, the A13 Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion).

Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ (Plus)

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ (Plus) Mobile Platform is a high-end smartphone and tablet SoC that Qualcomm announced in mid 2020. The SoC integrates a fast ‘Prime Core’ that clocks up to 3.1 GHz and three additional ARM Cortex-A77 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 difference to the older Snapdragon 865 is the faster clocked Prime Core and 10% higher clocked GPU.

Therefore, the Snapdragon 865 takes the top spot in mobile processors for Android based systems. In some multi-core workloads, the SD865+ can even perform on par with the Apple A13 SoC. Single thread, however is still a strong suit of the Apple SoCs.

Compared to the previous generations, the Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus does not integrate an LTE modem anymore, but has to be paired with the new X55 5G modem, that also supports LTE Cat 24/22. The Wi-Fi module however is still integrated and called FastConnect 6800 with support for Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and 8x8 MU-MIMU and 60 GHz 802.11ay with up to 10 Gbps. Bluetooth 5.1 is also supported including aptX Adaptive.

The integrated GPU is still called Adreno 650 and should offer 10% more performance than the Adreno 650 in the Snapdragon 865 (thanks to higher clock speed).

The on board Hexagon 698 DSP now offers a KI performance of up to 15 TOPS (up from 7 TOPS in the 855) and still uses a combination of CPU, GPU, HVX and Tensor cores. The Spectra 480 ISP is also untouched. The integrated Computer Vision Engine (CV-ISP) now supports Dolby Vision, 8K videos and 200 megapixel photos.

The built-in memory controller supports LPDDR5 with up to 2,750 MHz and LPDDR4X with 2,133 MHz.

The Snapdragon 855+ is manufactured at TSMC in the new improved 7nm process (N7P, DUV-based). The process offers a 7% higher performance or 10% less power consumption compared to the old N7 process.