Qualcomm recently launched Snapdragon 888 chipset which was an upgrade to Snapdragon 865. The latter was launched in March 2020. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 is widely speculated to be the chipset that will power flagship Android smartphones in 2021.
Even in the strong presence of Qualcomm, let’s not forget the US tech giant Apple’s A14 System-on-a-chip (SoC). Qualcomm recently revealed the benchmark scored of their new SoC by running it on a reference device. Let’s decode those scores and see which one is better among the three? Is it Snapdragon 865 or Snapdragon 888 or Apple’s A14 bionic?
| Benchmarks | Snapdragon 888 5G Reference Device | Snapdragon 865 | Apple A14 Bionic (iPhone 12 Pro Max) |
| AnTuTu Overall | 740847 | 579665 | 660086 |
| AnTuTu CPU | 197454 | 178416 | 178060 |
| AnTuTu GPU | 319439 | 216957 | 269683 |
| Geekbench Single Core | 1139 | 873 | 1591 |
| Geekbench Multi Core | 3810 | 3157 | 4138 |
| GFXBench Manhattan 1080p Offscreen (FPS) | 170 | 128 | 207 |
The chart above shows how well Snapdragon 888 5G is ahead of Snapdragon 865. But at the same time, it tells about the dominance of Apple A14 Bionic in the chipset market. The A14 Bionic clearly led the chart in Geekbench and GFXBench scores. Snapdragon can be seen leading the way in the AnTuTu benchmark but scores between Android and iOS devices are not actually comparable.
Geekbench, a CPU benchmark tool, is among the most famous test suites. This is for the first time any of Qualcomm’s SoC has broken the 1000 mark. Not only A14 is ahead of Snapdragon 888 and 865 but A13 also has a better score than both of them. A14 scored 1591 points whereas A13 has a score of 1,331. Thus, this clearly signifies Apple’s dominance.
Apple A14 has 77 frames-per-second (FPS) sustained and 102 peak performance. They are followed by A13 and then the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. The latter has 86 peak performance. Snapdragon 865, the older version, has below 60 peak performance.
