Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Silicon Wars 2024: Snapdragon vs Exynos vs Apple vs Google vs MediaTek”.
Hey there, man, Gary Sims, and this is Android authority now 2024 is well on the way and if you’re looking to buy a new flagship smartphone this year, you have a huge Choice: there are phones from Apple and from Samsung and OnePlus and Sony, and so many Others and each of these different phones have the potential of using a different processor, a system on a chip, and there are so many different system on of chips available today, even up at the flagship end. So you’ve got uh chips from Qualcomm from Apple from Samsung. From mediatech, even Google makes its own processor. So in this article I want to compare these different processes from the different companies to help you to understand, which is the best chip that you could put in your new flagship device. Now, choosing the best system on a chip is not as easy as you might think.
There are many many different metrics that you can use to determine and which is the best. So of course there is Peak CPU and GPU performance. That’S often a number that people are interested in, but what happens if you are using your phone for several minutes, 20 minutes half an hour. Does the performance remain the same? This is called sustained performance, so there are sustained performance metrics and they are often quite different to the Peak Performance metrics. But then there’s more things after that which process node. Is it on how many transistors does it have? What are the AI functionalities? What are the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, connectivity options, 5G, 4G and so on? So there’s lots of different ways to look at a chip to determine if it’s the best one for you. So there are several players this year available in a whole range of smartphones, both Android and iOS, and so these are the ones we’re going to be looking at today in this article, starting with the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 and then the Samsung exos 2400. Then we mustn’t forget the Google tensor G3, which you find, for example, in the pixel 8.
Then we’ve got the mediatech dimensity 9300 and then two offerings from Apple, the a16 bionic and the a17 pro. Now we’re going to be hearing a lot about cortex CPU cores. So what are they? They are cores designed by arm itself, and the cortex X4 is the fourth generation.
Hence the four of the high performance X Series CPU, it’s up to 40 % more power efficient when targeting the same Peak Performance as the previous generation. That’S the cortex X3. So we’re going to see a lot of mentions of the X4 and actually a little bit of the X3. In this article, then you’ve got the cortex a720, which is a middle core, with increased performance at the same power than the previous generation. The a 715 and that by that I mean at the same frequency, built at the same process node and then you have the efficiency Calles, the a520 22 % better power efficiency than the the cortex a510.
So we find all of those inside of the Android smartphones Apple designs, its own processors doesn’t use arms, design, clean room design using uh its own engineers, and so they are not cortex processors. So we look at this graph quickly. I did cover all of this when I covered the launch of the X4, the a720 and so on. So this is, for example, is his performance on the bottom power on the up.
So if you look here, if you go up this graph here, this point here is the same performance as the cortex X3. But, of course using much less power. And if you ramp up the power you get greater and greater performance as you go along and the same here. The curve with the a720 and the same here with the 520 they’ve got an a blowup view here of that, so always with one generation you want it to be. You know more performance more to the right and lower down. That’S really what you’re looking for! So let’s look at the CPUs of our different offerings, so we’ve got 10 core in the xos 2400 nine core in the tensor G3, eight core in the Snapdragon and in the dimensity and then six cores in the two apple chips.
So how is that done? We’Ve got one cortex X4 core, followed by five a720 cores at different clock frequencies and then four 520 cores in the exos so 10 in Total 1 plus 2, 3. 4. 10. In total, the tensor G3 uses an X3 core. So we did mentioned that in passing. That’S the previous generation and then 4 a715 cores. We mentioned those again in passing now remember that the pixels have a different Cadence, so always looks like it’s a bit older cuz, it’s kind of six months. Uh differ so anyway. That’S 1, 4 plus 4. That’S a nine core.
Then we got the Snapdragon here: 1, 3, 5, 2. So again, five a720 middle cores there and then just two a520 Calles at the end. Whereas there are four here in the xos, 2400 demens gone completely other way: they’ve gone with four X4 cores, so this is called the big core, only architecture, one of them clocked a bit higher and then four a720 cores, but no a520 cores and then, as I Said the Apple Ed, their own designs, they’ve got two big cores Everest and a kind of a a revised version of the Everest in the A7 Pro and then four efficiency cores sore too and uh. Sawtooth uh revise there. So six cores uh in total, but do notice here that the highest clock speed.
The whole lot is here: 3.78 GHz for those cores in the a17 Pro compared to the tensor here, 2.91 gig. So a huge difference there between those the others, are above three gigahertz and uh. What we got 3.3 here in the uh Snapdragon uh, 8 gen 3.
It’S probably the Galaxy version. Now, why does Apple only have six cores where other Flagship processors have eight nine or even 10 cores. Well, Apple’s design philosophy is to use two very high performant Calles, as we noted there very high clock frequency. That means they’re going to use a lot of power drain the battery very quickly, but the payoff is that you get very high Peak Performance now. I do read sometimes comments where people say imagine. If Apple used, eight cores or nine cores like the competition, they would really be amazingly fast.
Well, of course, the point is Apple can’t because those two cores use a lot of energy, a lot of power and they give a lot of performance. But if you use four of them, then it would just flatten the battery very very quickly. That’S why Apple do use four or even more in things like the M range of chips for the iPad Pro for the MacBook and MacBook Air and so on, because it has that bigger battery has more Cooling and it can do that. But in a smartphone it has for many many years stuck with this 2 4 setup, making just six cores, because those two cores are too big to have more of them. So that’s the way it’s chosen to do its design. So here we do have some speed here: we’ve got geekbench 6 single core and multicore scores uh and, as we can see here, this is the Apple here, the yellow one.
You can see that’s fastest here. Let’S actually put some numbers on 2931 for the iPhone 15 Pro, so that’s got the a17 uh Pro in it and then the exos version of the Galaxy s24, 2151 2298 for the Snapdragon version. So clearly, single threaded core performance, the uh iPhone, is in the lead, in fact, it’s 20 % better than the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 that we find in the s24 and just for those who are interested. This is 6.8 % better than the XO 2400.
So, of course, both of these are available in s 24s, depending on what region you’re in and depending on what region. You’Re in depends which one you get, and there is a slight difference in terms of single core performance. There there almost 7 % now when we get onto multicore it’s a different story. We can see here some numbers stretching out.
Some of these numbers look very similar here. Some here are down: that’s the Google pixel 8 Pro. So let’s put some numbers on 7278. So that’s the leader with the iPhone, then 7084, so almost the same there by the Snapdragon 6726, so a bit of a difference there.
So what’s this 5.3 % better than the exos uh 2400. So you again, the Snapdragon version is just slightly better than the xnos version again, depending on what part of the world you live in and it’s only the iPhone is only 2.7 % better than the Snapdragon 8 gen 3. So uh Snapdragon has been catching up over the years over time in single core and multicore, but still, you have to admit, take your hat off to Apple. It still does have the best design at the moment, of course, got a whole bunch of different things happening.
This year, but that’s for a different video at a different time and of course there, a real smers Board of delight here when it comes to the GPU. So many different gpus completely different here across the board. So the xos 2400 uses the eclipse uh 940 and that’s an AMD rdna 3 based mobile GPU. So that’s something they’ve been working on with AMD, Samsung and AMD working together to bring that it does include raay tracing and it’s got some super resolution.
Technology uh in there as well and that’s built on the whole chip itself is built on Samsung’s 4 nanometer, lpppp, plus uh setup. The tensor G3 uses the Marley g715 uh, and so that comes from arm itself. It’S arm’s GPU built on Samsung’s, 4 lpp node. So it’s an earli generation of the 4 nanometer corcom have their own gpus youve got the adrino 750.
Okay, that’s uh used in there. That’S got ra tracing as well, and also some super resolution uh in there as well. The dd93 has got back to Marley, but now it’s the immortalis g720. Why immortalis immortalis means it’s got a certain number minimum number of cores for Branding purposes and it also supports Ray tracing.
That’S built on tsmc’s 4 nanometer uh, as is the Snapdragon there, but there’s a slight difference in which generation there and then you’ve got the Apple. I’Ve got Apple’s GPU, which has its Heritage in the imagination, GPU the power VR GPU from imagination and the a17 pro. Actually has Ray tracing as well, so one two three four of our six have raid tracing built in, but here’s the key. This is built with tsmc’s 3 nanometer process, node, so very, very open competition here amongst the gpus.
Let’S see what that looks like in actual uh score, so we’ve got three different scores here: Wildlife, Wildlife, extreme and solar Bay and solar Bay is the raid tracing, which is why it’s missing, for example, here on the A14 and the pixel 8 Pro cuz, they don’t Support it now, you can see here for wildlife obviously ly way ahead here for well the arm ones, the IMD one corcom one much lower here, however, there is a difference between wildlife and Wildlife extreme, particularly to do with limiting frame rates. So we do see here that um in the purple bar here we can see that’s a different story here. When we get to Wildlife, extreme and solar Bay, we can see the exos here is doing very, very well. So let’s put some numbers on that Wildlife.
Extreme 4468 4,468 for the demens over 5,000 for the Snapdragon uh 8 gen, 3, 4390 for the AMD. So these are interesting scores and we can see here the leader. There is definitely the Snapdragon and then 4,224. So in terms of wildlife extreme, we can say with confidence that all of the Android uh flagships for this year so not including the Google 8 uh Pro there. They all beat the iPhone uh easily. So that’s an interesting score.
In fact, the uh Snapdragon 8 beats it by 22 % now for rate racing. The XNX 2400 is 2.2 % faster than the Snapdragon 8 gen 3. So that’s a good point for the exos CU.
Up until now, it kind of suffered being behind in both CPU and in traditional GPU. Benchmarking with the r tracing is doing very well and in fact it’s 37 % faster than the iPhone 15 Pro. So if you do have an s24 with the exos – and you are feeling a little down cheer yourself up by knowing that it’s 37 % faster at ra tracing than the most expensive iPhone that you can get – okay, that’s it! My name is Gary Sims.
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