In Apple’s keynote event earlier this week on Tuesday, three new iPhones were launched powered by the Apple A13 Bionic chipset, which is claimed to be the fastest chip on any smartphone. Huawei also recently introduced its new Kirin 990 chip that offers an entirely 5G focussed mobile platform. But we can never forget the market leader, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 Plus, while comparing the best of the best chipsets currently available in the market.

Here we have compared three of the world’s highly-rated chipsets over four parameters.

Hardware

Apple A13 Bionic sports a Hexa-core CPU with two lightning cores working at 2.66GHz and four thunder cores. Kirin 990 has a tri-cluster octa-core CPU — two Cortex-A76 cores at 2.86GHz and another set of two at 2.36GHz alongwith four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.95GHz. Snapdragon 855 Plus also has a tri-cluster CPU but with impressive architecture. It has custom Kryo 485 (A-76) cores, out of which one is clocked at 2.96GHz and the other three at 2.42GHz. The other four cores are Kryo 485(A-55), clocked at 1.78GHz.

A13 Bionic uses 8.5 billion transistors, which is a massive improvement compared to the A12 chipset, which uses 6.9 billion transistors. Whereas Kirin 990 has10.3 billion transistors.

Also read: Snapdragon 710 vs 675 vs 636

GPU and RAM

Apple A13 Bionic chipset has an Apple-designed quad-core GPU and LPDDR4X RAM, whereas Kirin 990 uses a Mali-G76MP16, 700MHz GPU alongwith LPPDDR4X RAM. Kirin 990’s GPU is less powerful than the other two. Apple leads the power segment, followed by Snapdragon 855 Plus’s Adreno 640, 700MHz with LPDDR4X RAM.

Artificial Intelligence

Apple A13 Bionic has an octa-core Neural Engine to perform AI operations capable of performing as many as 1 trillion tasks in 1 second. Apple has also decided to include the Deep Fusion technology in its new devices via a software update, which works on the principle of image stacking for creating HDR images.

Kirin 990 5G uses three-cores Da Vinci NPU. It has two big cores and one smaller core. The bigger cores handle high power tasks, whereas the small core handles all the small and low power tasks.

Snapdragon 855+ uses Snapdragon’s Hexagon 690 quad-core AI engine. This engine is used alongwith a dedicated tensor accelerator which gives advanced machine learning performance. It offers a lot of features when it comes to the AI-based camera system.

Benchmark Scores

Apple A13 Bionic on Apple iPhone 11 Pro scored 5,472 in single-core and 13,769 in multi-core on Geekbench, the highest Geekbench smartphone score to date. Snapdragon 855 Plus on ASUS ROG Phone II scored 3,623 points in single-core and 11,365 points in multi-core. Kirin 990 5G’s Geekbench score is yet not available. Huawei P30 Pro, which packs a Kirin 990 5G chip, scored a 309.056 on AnTuTu Benchmark.

Also read: Snapdragon 855 vs Apple A12 Bionic vs Exynos 9820 vs Kirin 980