Apple's new A18 Pro chipset powers the latest iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max. It promises powerful CPU performance and brings moderate upgrades in the GPU and NPU departments. That said, how does the A18 Pro stack up against the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset? To find the difference in performance and efficiency, we have compared the A18 Pro and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 in a detailed way.
Apple A18 Pro vs Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 – Apple should be worried!
The Apple A18 Pro is manufactured on TSMC's 3nm (N3E) process node, and reportedly the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is also built on the same node. However, Apple has gone with its usual six-core setup including 2x performance cores and 4x efficiency cores. The performance core goes up to 4.04 GHz, quite high for a mobile chipset in a passively cooled device.
Qualcomm, on the other hand, is expected to include eight CPU cores on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, and you finally get the Nuvia-designed Oryon CPU cores, which are available on the Snapdragon X series of Windows laptops. Recent leaks have revealed that two Oryon cores on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 also break the 4GHz mark, going as high as 4.32GHz, while 6x Oryon cores are clocked up to 3.53GHz. There are no efficiency cores, just like the Snapdragon X Elite.
One notable difference is that Apple has adopted the Armv9.2a architecture for the A18 Pro with support for SME (Scalable Matrix Extension) which provides faster AI performance via the CPU. While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is still on the older Armv8 architecture that doesn't take advantage of high compute add-ons. This means that the A18 Pro is likely to perform better in AI/ML tasks.
