Apple, for years now, has been sitting on the top of the ladder when it comes to mobile processors, whether it’s the A-series processors in the famous iPhone series or the M-series processors found in Apple iPads and MacBooks.
Apple has been designing and manufacturing its own processors for years now, and it has always been a cat-and-mouse game where other mobile chip manufacturers like Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek would try to catch up with what Apple had to offer, only to find out that the next version of that processor is here, and Apple is back on top again.
But over the years, the performance difference between the latest offerings from the major chip manufacturers like Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek has been narrowing down. While Apple still maintains the lead in some aspects, other chip makers are starting to catch up for real this time around.
So Apple, this month, launched their new iPhone 16 series, and with those new iPhones came the new Apple A18 and A18 Pro chips, with the A18 Pro being the best Apple has to offer.
The initial Geekbench scores for the new A18 Pro chip from Apple show a fairly significant bump up in performance compared to last year’s A17 Pro, with an extremely impressive single-core score of 3,409 and a respectable 8,492 in multi-core.
While those numbers are great, the latest offerings from MediaTek and Qualcomm seem to have Apple beat in multi-core performance. Both the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 and the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 are set to launch next month in October. While there are still a few weeks left until they are officially launched, leaked benchmarks from expected upcoming devices are starting to show up.
In a recent Geekbench listing, for what is believed to be the upcoming Oppo Find X8, which will be powered by the Dimensity 9400, the listing shows a multi-core score of 8,833, which seemingly beats the Apple A18 Pro by around 4 percent. We also saw an alleged Geekbench listing of the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, which scored a whopping 10,049 for the multi-core, which is about 25 percent faster than the Apple A18 Pro.
While Apple still maintains the lead in the single-core department, the competition is catching up and, in some ways, surpassing Apple. It is to be noted that the A18 Pro benchmarks are just initial benchmarks, and the offerings from Qualcomm and MediaTek have not yet launched and are due next month.
But although Apple is seemingly losing, it’s a win for everyone since more and more people now will get to experience blazing-fast processors and will be able to do a lot more with their devices. And we should thank Apple for bringing in the competition, which is always better for consumers.
What do you think about the current generation of mobile processors? While they are all off by a few percent, they are all extremely fast processors—even faster than the laptop I’m currently using. It’s crazy. Let me know what your thoughts are on our YouTube channel named Tech In Check, and I’ll see you around.