Apple introduced the new A14 Bionic chipset with the new iPad Air 2020 this week. This chipset will also power the upcoming iPhone 12 series. This is Apple’s in-house challenger to the Snapdragon 800 series from Qualcomm. Every year we hear how Apple has managed to usurp Qualcomm by offering a powerful yet power-efficient chipset. But this year, it seems the story has gone in a different direction, much to Qualcomm’s liking.
As per a new leaked Antutu benchmark screenshot, Apple A14 Bionic scores lower score than Snapdragon 865 series. The tweet here from reliable tipster Ice Universe shows us a stark difference in raw performance of the new chipset. The A14 Bionic tested on the purported iPhone 12 Pro Max scored 5,72,333 on Antutu benchmarks.
Compared to this, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ running on the Asus ROG Phone 3 managed to hit 6,29,245 earlier this year. The tipster considers the A14 Bionic is tuned to be far more power-efficient and focus on AI performance for various features on the iPhone 12 series.
While these tests don’t give us real-time performance value, benchmarks have usually tilted in Apple’s favour most of the time. So, for the buck to change, it’s likely the new Snapdragon 800 series chipset gets improved performance from their bigger cores. And even then, we’d prefer to wait and see if the overall performance of the processor, tuned with the software onboard delivers similar results.
Apple iPhone 12 set to launch next month
Apple is set to launch the iPhone 12 in the coming weeks. So we won’t have to wait for long to see if these benchmark scores matter for both these companies. Apart from the new Apple A14 Bionic chipsets, the new iPhone 12 models will also feature Snapdragon X60 5G modems as per a report by PhoneArena. This modem supports both the sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G signals. Contrasting leaks in the past have suggested that only the iPhone 12 Pro series, comprising the 12 Pro and the 12 Pro Max will feature support for mmWave signals, while the two base models will only support sub-6GHz signals. It remains to be seen how Apple distributes 5G capabilities over the iPhone 12 series.
