Apple's A14 Outperforms New Snapdragon 888 Chip Coming in Future Android Phones

Qualcomm today shared benchmark results for the Snapdragon 888 SoC that will be used in flagship Android phones coming out in 2021, and it's not able to keep pace with the A14 chip in the iPhone 12 models, nor the A13 in the ‌iPhone‌ 11.

AnandTech compared Qualcomm's benchmarks to benchmarks of Apple's devices, with the ‌iPhone‌ winning out in Geekbench 5 and GFXBench tests.

The Snapdragon 888 chip earned a single-core score of 1,135 and a multi-core score of 3,794, while the ‌iPhone‌ 12 Pro with A14 chip earned a single-core score of 1,603 and a multi-core score of 4,187.

In the GFXBench test, which measures GPU performance, Samsung scored an 86 (in frames per second), compared to the ‌iPhone‌ 12 Pro's 102.24. Sustained performance is unknown as of yet and will depend on the chip's power consumption, but AnandTech believes the Snapdragon 888 could ultimately win out over the ‌iPhone‌ if power consumption is competitive.

While the Snapdragon 888 doesn't look like it'll match the peak performance scores of the A13 or A14 SoCs used in Apple's iPhones, sustained performance will depend quite a bit on the power consumption of the chip. If this lands in at between 4 and 4.5W, then the majority of flagship Android phones in 2021 will likely be able to sustain this peak performance figure and allow Qualcomm to regain the mobile performance crown from Apple. Otherwise if the chip has to significantly throttle, then 888 will probably fall short of retaking the crown. But even if that's the case, for Android users it shouldn't matter too much: the generational leap over 2020 phones would still be immense, and by far one of the largest GPU performance leaps Qualcomm has been able to achieve to date.

The Snapdragon 888 chip isn't quite performing at the level of the A13 or A14 chips from Apple, but it is a significant improvement over prior-generation Snapdragon chips used in current flagship Android smartphones. CPU performance is up 25 percent and GPU performance is up 35 percent.

AnandTech says that as these benchmarks were provided by Qualcomm and not independently obtained, we have to trust that Qualcomm's numbers are accurate, but the site expects the figures to be "accurate and reproduced in commercial devices."