Qualcomm has provided benchmarks for its flagship Snapdragon 888 system on a chip and shows poor performance compared to the iPhone 12 and even loses to older iPhones running the A13.
Qualcomm announces its new processors every year in mid-December to prevent them from arriving at CES products. In 2020, the announcements were made online and the landmarks were provided by the company.
Snapdragon 888 worked well compared to the current range of Android devices, such as Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, but failed to surpass the latest Apple iPhones. Even the iPhone 11 range from a year ago and the iPhone SE running the A13 processor have surpassed the new Qualcomm processor.
Qualcomm uses some new and powerful technologies in Snapdragon 888, which makes it a very competitive processor. It uses Cortex-X1 as part of a similar small-to-large design that the A14 implements. The new SoC also includes the Adreno 660 GPU, which is expected to perform 35% better than previous GPUs.
Anandtech received the benchmarks from Qualcomm and compared them with known scores of other products. First up is Geekbench 5, the well-known processor comparison tool, which provides scores for single-core and multi-core operation.
Geekbench 5 CPU Image Credit CPU reference results: AnandTech
The single-core score increased year-on-year by about 23.5% from 919 to 1135, which is shy for the iPhone 11 Pro running the A13, which scored 1,331. The multi-core score improved by 16.9% to get a score of 3,794, which exceeds the A13 processor’s score of 3,366, but does not approach the A14 score of 4,187.
The GPU benchmark shows even less promising results. Using GFXBench results, Anandtech presented the graphical scores for different products compared to the new Snapdragon 888.
GFXBench Graphic Reference Results Image Credit: AnandTech
Scores are reported in peak frames per second, and Snapdragon 888 easily beat all current Android flagships by up to 55%. This could be an anomaly, but it is what was reported by Qualcomm, which previously suggested that the graphics improvements would be about 35%.
Compared to the iPhone 12 and iPhone 11 range, it didn’t go so well. It can be assumed that because these are peak results during the test, Snapdragon may work differently under extended load conditions, but these tests will have to wait until examiners get their hands on devices running the processor.
Qualcomm has released other results, such as AI performance tests, but these are not comparable to iPhone processors. Apple has powerful neural motors in its A-Series chips, not to mention its M1 processor, but these have not been properly compared.