The next-gen mobile processing landscape is beginning to take shape. Major players Apple, Huawei, and Qualcomm have announced their latest flagship-tier chipsets built on bleeding edge 5nm manufacturing processes. A Silicon Battle going on for Snapdragon 888 vs. A14 Bionic.
Over the course of the next few months, high-end smartphones powered by the Apple A14 Bionic, Huawei Kirin 9000, and Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 will go head-to-head. All three make familiar promises to improve performance, energy efficiency, and enhance machine learning capabilities. And that’s just for starters.
Image Source – Tech Radar
We’re also eagerly awaiting Samsung’s higher-end alternative to its Exynos 1080 and possibly whatever MediaTek has in store for the year 2021.
But for now, we will focus on all the confirmed information we have from the big three announcements from the closing quarter of 2020. So, let us dive into the differences and similarities between these next-gen processors.
| Apple A14 Bionic | HiSilicon Kirin 9000 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Config | 2x Firestorm (Big cores) 4x Icestorm (Little cores) (Fully-custom CPU designs) |
1x Cortex-A77 @ 3.13GHz 3x Cortex-A77 @ 2.54GHz 4x Cortex-A55 @ 2.05GHz |
1x Cortex-X1 @ 2.84GHz 3x Cortex-A78 @ 2.4GHz 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.8GHz |
| GPU | 4 core (Apple in-house design) | Arm Mali-G78, 24 cores | Adreno 660 |
| RAM | LPDDR4X | LPDDR5 / LPDDR4X | LPDDR5 / LPDDR4X |
| AI / DSP | 16-core Neural Engine | 2x big core 1x tiny core |
Hexagon 780 (Fused Scalar, Tensor, and Vector) |
| Modem | 4G LTE 5G sub-6Ghz & mmWave 7500Mbps download 3000Mbps upload (external) |
4G LTE 5G sub-6Ghz & mmWave 7500Mbps download 3500Mbps upload (integrated) |
4G LTE 5G sub-6Ghz & mmWave 7500Mbps download 3000Mbps upload (integrated) |
| Process | 5nm | 5nm | 5nm |
The Silicon Battle For Snapdragon 888 vs. A14 Bionic
Despite all being based on 5nm manufacturing processes, these chips could not be more different. There are significant differences between the inner processing components.
Apple’s A14 offers up its custom big and little CPU cores under the Firestorm and Icestorm monikers. Meanwhile, Qualcomm and Huawei’s HiSilicon use off the shelf parts from Arm.
Image Source – Tech Radar
However, the Snapdragon 888 benefits from the newer high-end Cortex-X1 and Cortex-A78, while Huawei uses a last-gen Cortex-A77.
Apple has maintained a healthy lead over its Android chipset rivals in the single-core CPU department for several generations now.
The A14 boasts a further 21% jump over the A13. Meanwhile, Qualcomm boasts a 25% CPU boost this generation over the Snapdragon 865, while the Kirin 9000 claims a 10% win over the Plus variant of Qualcomm’s older chip.
They are all excellent in their particular fields. However, the major battle is Snapdragon 888 vs. A14 Bionic.