The competition between Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips and Apple’s A-series chipsets in the ever-evolving landscape of smartphone technology has been fascinating to witness. The most recent rumors circling the technology industry are saying that the following Snapdragon chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 may finally surpass Apple’s A18, which is supposed to drive the iPhone 16, if this is true then this could be an important moment, as it could shift the dynamics of who actually dominates in the smartphone industry.
A big trend in recent years has been the rapidly narrowing gap in terms of performance between Qualcomm’s processors and the ones from Apple, a trend which the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 looks set to intensify further. Early rumors suggest that the new Qualcomm’s new processor is set to be faster than Apple’s in benchmark scores, which has naturally got consumers excited about prospects for what they’ll get to enjoy with their next phones as well as the industry at large hypocrite
According to the rumored benchmark scores, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is said to beat Apple's A18 in single core performance with a score of 3,500, compared to the anticipated 3,300 on A18; it is also believed to excel in multi core performance and have a faster GPU. These benchmark leaks goes to show that Qualcomm is relentless in making fast chips and plans on giving Apple a run for their money.
One of the key areas where the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 could have an edge and a significant milestone will be the on the ARM Cortex cores that it is not using. During the launch of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Qualcomm talked about its time spent in-house at Motorola, rather than using Arm-licensed cores, for its Qualcom-exclusive in-house Oryon cores. It believes, that like in the past, it has another strategic advantage having designed its own cores to be in a much better place than Arm-licensed paths that its competitors had taken. As previously described, their acquisition of Nuvia in January of this year shows how far they are willing to go to bring performance-per-watt CPU technology to its customers and also bring its enormous and noticeable 20.5% strategic return on reservations in the first three years of the acquisition. They are committed to bringing the best technology cores to their customers. The new silicon is evidence of the up and beyond that Apple has set.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 may also unveil as its first 3nm chip, a key technological point for enhancing efficiency and performance. In addition, the Snapdragon 8 will boast a 4.3GHz speculated single-core clock speed, which is a much larger jump from the last generation and in turn raises questions of how Qualcomm will handle power consumption and thermals if those claims are accurate.
Still, it’s curious that despite Qualcomm’s leaps, skepticism has persisted about leaked benchmark scores. People question without hard facts whether its chips will run hot or use up too much power, and what the real world affect of n-cores running at 2.0GHz is. Even with all the leaks, I have still seen few actual reports comparing commercial Qualcomm Snapdragon 810s with commercial, real-world iPhone 6 or iPad Air 2 chips.
Qualcomm release schedule had complexities all on its own. While Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 845 in December 2017 to go against the Apple A11 since they got their processors around the same time however this has not worked in their favor in previous years since Apple has release their iPhone earlier and the improvements in performance are better on paper than the Qualcomm chip. There is still some trick mystery loops around the Snapdragon 855 that has to get worked out still. It is likely that there are multiple variants of the Snapdragon 855 as well as the Apple A12 since not all processors are made equally in the series either. Maybe what one of these tests could have been is a less powerful Snapdragon 855 processor compared to a beefier A12 processor. This might be the case for the Snapdragon 855 as well. Each phone revision will have its own limits for performance as well. For example, a phone with more RAM will toggle better than a phone with more RAM. So it's very possible a Snapdragon 855 reference phone was tested with 6GB of ram while the A12 reference phone was tested with 4GB. Ram performance while terribly seen can greatly hurt your overall score and since these are unknown whether or not the
It's clear that the ideas behind processors such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 from Qualcomm and Apple's A18 go to show the true nature of innovation and leaps in both the technological and smartphone revolution. If ever Qualcomm wanted to take lead in the performance of smartphones, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is pretty much the culmination and we have other companies who have shown off similar new flagships processors recently-but does that mean that the iPhone's time as king is truly at an end? We will see, that's for sure.