The performance gap between flagship chipsets narrows further every year, to the point where real-world differences are negligible, but that doesn't stop eager leakers from making bold claims about the on-paper power of a chipset over another.
The upcoming flagship showdown will pit Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 against Apple's yet-unannounced A18, and a new rumor from South Korea (via NotebookCheck) suggests the former will boast better benchmark scores than the latter.
Specifically, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, which is sure to power the Samsung Galaxy S25 and more of the best Android phones in 2025, will achieve a single-core Geekbench score of around 3500, where the A18 linked to Apple's iPhone 16 struggles. to surpass 3300. Qualcomm's next flagship chipset will also supposedly outperform Apple's equivalent in multi-core and GPU tests.
So could this mean that the Galaxy S25 is an objectively more powerful phone than the iPhone 16? Judging by these figures, yes, but there is a big caveat to consider here.
The leaker notes that the main core of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be clocked at 4.3 GHz, which is significantly higher than the equivalent 3.3 GHz figure of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. A clock speed of 4.3 GHz It's not yet viable on a smartphone, so while it may lead to impressive lab-based benchmark scores, we wouldn't put too much stock in seeing comparable scores replicated by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4-powered smartphone.
That said, Qualcomm's upcoming flagship chipset still looks to be a formidable beast. For the first time, the company is using its own, more powerful Oryon cores to produce the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (its previous chipsets were produced using cores licensed from Arm) and the next chipset could also be the first of Qualcomm to be manufactured using a 3nm process, which essentially allows for 70% more transistors (and therefore better thermal efficiency) than the 5nm process.
Qualcomm Senior Vice President Chris Patrick has already teased that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will deliver “astounding levels of performance,” so we're excited to see how phones like the Galaxy S25 fare when equipped with this upcoming brain. generation.
Don't bet against Apple
Of course, Apple's A18 will undoubtedly feature incredible performance as well. According to sources, the Neural Engine in the next iPhone chipset will have “significantly” more cores than the Neural Engine in the A17 Pro, so the iPhone 16 could match or surpass the best Android phones when it comes to AI capabilities. .
We've also heard that each iPhone 16 model will have an A18 chipset, while in previous years Apple's latest and greatest chipsets were reserved for the top iPhones, like the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
In any case, we will have to wait until early next year before we can directly compare the performance of the iPhone 16 with the Galaxy S25 and therefore compare Apple's A18 chipset with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, but it is exciting think that smartphones. we will be getting even more powerful in the coming months.
