Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 vs A18 benchmark scores suggest days of iPhone supremacy are over

Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 vs A18 benchmark scores suggest days of iPhone supremacy are over

Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips are getting closer and closer to being as fast as Apple's A-series chips. There's a new rumor that says the next Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip might even be faster than the A18 chip, which is likely to be in the iPhone 16.

In today's smartphone market, flagship phones are already pretty powerful, offering more performance than most people need. But there's always a demand for even better performance, especially with new features like AI and the need for longer software support for Android phones.

There's a rumor going around in South Korea that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip might outperform Apple's A18 chip in benchmark tests. The rumor says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 could score 3,500 in single-core performance, beating the expected score of 3,300 for the A18. It's also said that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will do well in multi-core performance, and its graphics processing unit (GPU) will be faster too.

One reason for this potential performance boost is the new Oryon cores in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. Qualcomm, the company behind the chip, says these cores are custom-designed by them, unlike previous versions that used cores licensed from Arm. These Oryon cores were made by Nuvia, a company that Qualcomm bought in 2021 to compete better with Apple.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is also supposed to be made using a 3nm manufacturing process, which is smaller and more advanced than before. It's said to have only high-performance Phoenix cores, with the main core running at 4.3 GHz, much faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's top speed of 3.30 GHz. But having a faster chip might mean it uses more power and gets hotter, which could be a problem.

But we should be cautious about believing everything in these rumors. The actual difference in performance might not be as big as people are saying, especially when you consider things like power usage and how the tests were done.

There's also talk about there being different versions of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip, with some being faster than others. If that's true, the A18 chip from Apple might still be faster overall.

In the end, while it's great that Qualcomm is trying to make the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip even better, we won't know for sure how it compares to the A18 chip until we see official tests and benchmarks.