Apple A15 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 4G

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 888 4G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 4G Mobile Platform is a high-end SoC for smartphones that was introduced in mid 2021 and manufactured in 5 nm at Samsung. Compared to the earlier released Snapdragon 888 5G, the 4G variant only features a 4G LTE modem.

The chip integrates one “Prime Core” based on a ARM Cortex-X1 architecture clocked at up to 2.84 GHz. Three more performance cores are based on the A78 but clock up to 2.42 GHz. Furthermore, four energy saving cores are integrated that are based on the ARM Cortex-A55 architecture and clock at up to 1.8 GHz. In addition to the processor cores, the SoC integrates a WiFi 6e modem, a Hexagon 780 DSP (up to 26 TOPS of AI performance) and a Spectra 580 ISP. The integrated memory controller now supports faster LPDDR5 memory with up to 3,200 MHz. 

The performance of the processor cores should be around 15% better than the old Snapdragon 865+. The integrated Adreon 660 GPU should make a bigger jump by 35% (most likely compared to the SD 865).