Qualcomm’s Newest Android Chip Still Can’t Beat Apple’s A15 Bionic from Last Year

Qualcomm unveiled its next-generation flagship chip for Android devices, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, earlier this week. However, Qualcomm’s latest and greatest mobile platform can’t even beat Apple’s A15 Bionic chip from 2021, let alone the more powerful A16 Bionic from this year’s iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max — reports MacRumors.

The first Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered devices are expected to launch by year’s end, Qualcomm said. But benchmark results from an unnamed Vivo smartphone (model number V2227A) with the new chip have already surfaced online, courtesy of DealNTech.

Suffice it to say, things aren’t looking too good for the Android side of the race. In Geekbench 5, the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 posted a single-core score of 1483 and 4709 in multi-core performance. Apple’s A15 Bionic chip, first introduced in 2021’s iPhone 13 Pro and carried over to this year’s entry-level iPhone 14 series, boasts a single-core Geekbench 5 score of 1709 in comparison.

The A15’s multi-core performance is roughly on par with the new Snapdragon chip. Apple’s current-gen A16 Bionic, though, is another story altogether. The A16, which powers Apple’s flagship iPhone 14 Pro lineup, blows the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 right out of the water with a 26% higher single-core Geekbench 5 score of 1874, as well as a 14% lead in multi-core performance at 5372 points.

“The competition is still working to catch up to the performance of the A13, which we first introduced with iPhone 11 three years ago,” Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, touted during the iPhone 14 launch event in September — he certainly wasn’t wrong.

Qualcomm’s next flagship platform loses out to Apple’s last-gen chip, despite the company’s claimed improvements of 35% in CPU performance, 25% in GPU performance, and 40% in power efficiency, compared to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

“Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will revolutionize the landscape of flagship smartphones in 2023,” said Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s senior VP and general manager of mobile handsets. While it looks like the upcoming chip will once again take the performance crown in the Android ecosystem, it will fall well behind Apple’s silicon supremacy.