Apple A15 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1

Apple A15 Bionic

The Apple A15 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 13 and iPad Mini (2021) models. It was announced late 2021 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. The CPU performance increases only slightly compared to the A14, but GPU (in the higher end models) offers higher gains.

The chip is manufactured in 5nm and integrates 15.8 billion transistors (compared to the 11.8 of the A14).

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 Mobile Platform is a high-end SoC for smartphones that was introduced in mid 2022 and manufactured in 4 nm at TSMC. It integrates one “Prime Core” based on a ARM Cortex-X2 architecture clocked at up to 3.2 GHz. Three more performance cores are based on the Cortex-A710 but clocked up to 2.5 GHz. Furthermore, four energy saving cores are integrated that are based on the ARM Cortex-A510 architecture and clocked at up to 1.8 GHz. All cores can use the shared 6 MB level 3 cache.

Compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the SoC is now produced in the more power efficient 4nm process at TSMC and offers higher clocked CPU and GPU cores (at a lower power consumption according to Qualcomm).

The integrated AI Engine can offer up to 4x faster AI performance thanks to the bigger Tensor engine. The 18-Bit-Spectra-ISP also saw some big improvements and is now called Snapdragon Sight.

The integrated Adreno 730 offers a 30% graphics boost compared to the previous Adreno 660.

The integrated Snapdragon X65 5G modem is also new and offers faster transfer rates (up to 10 Gbps download and 3 Gbps upload). The FastConnect 6900 offers support for the current Wifi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.