Now that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has been announced, it’s time to start comparing it to the latest and greatest chips on the market. And its biggest competitor isn’t MediaTek – though you can still see our Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs MediaTek Dimensity 9500 comparison too. In fact, it is the Apple A19 Pro, which just debuted on the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.
Of course, the A19 Pro will only be used in the iPhone while the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will be available in many flagship smartphones over the next nine months. But it is interesting to see how these two stack up.
Specs
Now, because Apple doesn’t really release many specs about its chips, it’s hard to really give a full spec comparison here, but we can see that both chips are quite powerful. And surprisingly, Apple is still using a Qualcomm modem for 5G and WiFi, though it is a bit older than what the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 sports.
Benchmarks
Since there are no devices available with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 just yet (very, very soon though!), we are having to rely on benchmarks from Qualcomm’s reference device, which we were able to benchmark this week in Maui.
First up, here is Geekbench 6. Obviously, the GPU score is very lop-sided here, but keep in mind that the tests are different on the GPU side from platform to platform, so take that with a grain of salt. But Qualcomm does beat the A19 Pro quite nicely in the multi-core score.
Next up is AnTuTu. This benchmark tests quite literally everything about the device, from 3D rendering to memory and everything in between. On the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm says we should expect scores between 4.25 and 4.5 million, though we got slightly lower here. Still, that is a huge jump over the A19 Pro. But, also important to remember here that AnTuTu is different on each platform, so not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
Which chip is better?
So, which chip is the better one to get? Well, if you’re deciding between an A19 Pro or Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 device, you’re not focused on the processor, but the operating system. The A19 Pro is a pretty powerful chipset from Apple, and is also very efficient. But the same thing can be said about the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
The bottom line is, you really can’t go wrong with either of these chips.
