Ezekiel Busmente CS 150 Research Paper (Draft)

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Topic: Does Apple possess faster chipsets for smartphones right now compared to Android devices?

Smartphones are one of the world’s biggest tools for doing man’s everyday tasks. For some people, their jobs even

depend on the use of this device. Communicating, researching, computing, and recording are just some of the uses of these

smartphones and as time passes it only promises to get better and more useful. Apple is one of the biggest smartphone

markets across the globe. As of May 2019, ​Forbes lists Apple as the third best company in the United States at a market

capitalization of $961.3 billion. For reference, ​market capitalization refers to how much is the worth of a company which is

determined by the stock market; it can also be defined as the total market value of all outstanding shares. With all that money

Apple certainly must be doing something right with their products. If I know anything about the technology industry is that

the cost of a device is usually parallel to its quality or performance. According to ​Statista​, there are approximately 380

million users of iPhones worldwide. And with the world population of 7.7 billion at the end of 2019 according to

Worldometer​, that’s over 4.9% of the people on Earth who use iPhones. What makes Apple’s products so great? One of the

things they always boast about during their conferences pre-launch of their smartphones, if not the camera, is their chipset.

They always talk about how their bionic and fusion chips are the fastest in the market as of the time. In this research paper

we will find out if Apple does have the fastest chipsets in the market and if the performance of their smartphones is worth

the price.

By general definition, a chipset is a group of integrated circuits wherein it controls the flow of data and instructions

between the CPU or microprocessor and external devices. It also controls external buses, memory cache and other

peripherals. A CPU will not function without precise timing of the chipset. Before modern times, the motherboard was

actually filled with discrete integrated circuits. That would mean before chipsets were made, there were separate chips to

control each system component. This resulted in a somewhat messy layout and inefficient use of space. Better engineering

overtime resulted in a more efficient approach as well as the focus on speed for faster devices and smartphones. The chipset

is actually embedded in a smartphone which is designed to perform the assigned dedicated functions, often with dynamic

computing constraints. It’s embedded as part of the complete smartphone including other different hardware and mechanical

components. The more modern smartphones are equipped with more advanced embedded chipsets that can do many

different tasks depending on their programming. You have the chipset of your device to thank for because without it, doing

your everyday tasks with your smartphone would be impossible. I​t’s not just the smartphones that are getting better, modern

day chipset technology plays an important role in the evolution of the smartphone. If we look a couple of years back, the 28
nanometer chip was a great tech of its time, but soon it was replaced by the 20 nanometer chipset which is still used in

mid-range silicon chipsets. With that kind of efficiency and space, other features to improve the overall technology of the

smartphone is present. ​Imagine having a slow chipset. The daily task you usually do would be so inconvenient. Apps would

take so long to load, and each function would feel like forever to operate. Using apps such as Facebook or Instagram

wouldn’t feel pleasant to use anymore as apps require more modern system requirements in order to run smoothly. For the

gamers or designers out there, gaming would be out of the question because an outdated chipset wouldn’t be able to handle

most of the games in the market right now. It wouldn’t be able to process the high speed operations needed in order to

execute the commands of the app. Same goes for the designers and their designing apps.

As we live in the world currently being dominated by smartphones to make our daily tasks more convenient, we

should know how these devices are able to run. As mentioned earlier, Smartphones run on chipsets, which are specifically

made to perform various functions in real time with computing control. They are the most important part of all the embedded

hardware and mechanical equipment. Apple has always been a strong market when it came to smartphone sales. The new

iPhone, Apple’s flagship smartphone, is released at an annual rate. In each release, they hold a press conference wherein

Apple discusses the new features added to their new flagship device. One of the things they always change annually is the

chipset found in the new iPhone. As of now, the latest and best smartphone Apple has is the iPhone 11 Pro Max. It runs on

the Apple A13 Bionic chipset with additional specs at being powered by Hexa Core (2.65 GHz, Dual core, Lightning + 1.8

GHz, Quad core, Thunder) processor. To the normal person this would seem like gibberish. But this is actually top of the

line specifications for smartphone standards. A phone running at 2.65 GHz is pretty impressive. For reference, GHz or

gigahertz is the unit of measurement for AC (alternating current) or EM (electromagnetic) wave frequency equal to one

billion hertz. When referring to a computer processor or ​CPU​, GHz is a clock ​frequency which is also known as clock rate or

clock speed representing a cycle of time. The higher the GHz the faster the processor can compute for functions, process,

and run data. At 2.65 GHz, the iPhone 11 Pro Max can run 2.65 million instructions a second.

Apple has always been one of the premiere smartphone producers and one of the biggest jumps they’ve made in

their flagship phones is the upgrade from a fusion chip to a bionic chip. The last iPhone with the fusion chip Apple released

was the iPhone 7 with the A10 Fusion chipset. In the article published by ​Ashraf Eassa​, a publisher in the website ​The

Motley Fool,​ ​he discusses the differences between the bionic and fusion chipsets. What I understood from the article was

that with the A10 Fusion chipset in the iPhone 7, Apple introduced what it labels as ​“fusion”​ technology. That chip had four

processor cores with two cores being the high performance ones while the other two were the high-efficiency cores. The

advantage was twice as great. It delivered better performance on apps that would need it, but when only basic or light tasks

were running on the phone, it would power down the more power-hungry, high-performance cores, resulting in less battery
drain making it powerful yet efficient. In simpler terms, the two sets of cores had their own specific purpose. One for

high-end tasks and the other for simple ones. In the succeeding year, Apple would release its first smartphone to be powered

by the Bionic chipset. Two devices were initially released, namely the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X. The A11 Bionic chipset

has six processor cores two high-performance cores, which were 25% faster than the ones in the A10 Fusion, and four

high-efficiency cores, which were 70% faster than the ones in the A10 Fusion. The best feature of the Bionic chipset was

that all cores would be able to work simultaneously.

When measuring the performance of a chipset, a good medium besides the GHz is the ​GeekBench score.

GeekBench is a processor benchmarking program. It tests how fast your device can complete tasks, operations, and other

instructions. Like other CPU benchmarks, GeekBench runs a series of tests on a processor and times how long the processor

takes to complete the tasks. The faster the CPU can accomplish the task, the higher the GeekBench score. In order to run

GeekBench in your device, you first must install it and let it run. After it finishes running, the score of the device will be

revealed.

Below is the GeekBench score of Apple’s latest flagship smartphones as well as the last few devices that ran on the

fusion chipset. This ran on the latest version of GeekBench which is ​GeekBench 5​. As you can see the scores are staggering

with the latest device being more powerful by almost as much as half compared to the 2016 flagship devices released by

Apple. This first set of graphs is the score of a single core being utilized by the device

This is the second set of scores wherein it utilizes all multiple processing cores of the device. And with the given results, we

can see how the 2019 flagship dominates the 2016 flagship by almost three times more.
 In recent times, Apple actually published an article back in 2017 wherein they admitted the slowing down of their

older devices with each operating system update in order to preserve the battery life of their smartphones. It made sense

because more software requirements would mean more hardware requirements. And in order to balance out this effect, the

slowing down of a device would come into play in order to make the device last longer. Although backlash would certainly

come as some people would say that this was a tactic for Apple to make people buy newer smartphones. This has yet to be

addressed but the logical reasons being in order to preserve the device still stand as the best reason. Although this would lead

to people switching from iOS to Android.

Android has always been present in the smartphone industry. Believe it or not, is actually the most popular

operating system and Android devices actually make up most of the world’s smartphone users. The world’s smartphone

population is approximately 3.5 billion users according to ​Statista​. In that population, there are over 2.5 billion Android

users in the world as of May 8, 2019 according to the official Twitter page of Android. That’s over 71.4% of the world

actively using Android devices. One of the main reasons for the numerous users of Android users is because of the price.

The average cost of an Android device as of 2019 is listed at $219 (or Php 11,188.71) according to ​Statista.​ That’s pretty

cheap compared to the thousand dollar iPhones Apple manages to sell each year.

Although when discussing top of the line Android devices, they also reach the thousand dollar mark. Smartphones

such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ and the Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G are just some of the top Android devices available in

the market right now. The current fastest Android smartphone in the business right now is actually the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.

It is powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 990 chipset which clocks in at 2.0 GHz. It has eight cores wherein it has two high-end

operating cores, two mid-end operating ones, and four cores for operating basic tasks. Although, the smartphone is

advertised as the best device for media recording. With that, it is given how the power of the chipset is prioritizes in

providing power to the media features of the device in order to provide the best results.

Below you can find the top eight Android smartphones that scored the best in the GeekBench test. At first glance,

we can already see how it fares against Apple’s devices’ single core test. It’s impressive how the 2016 flagship of Apple
fares against the modern Android smartphones. To give the benefit of the doubt, this is only one core of the multicore

device..

This next graph is the results of the devices in multicore operations. We can again see how Apple’s latest flagship

still stands supreme. We also notice how the top eight from the single core now differs from the top eight of the multicore

operations. It seems as though it is also reasonable to say that the number of cores doesn’t mean faster performance.

Samsung and OnePlus seem to have utilized the chipset of their devices differently. As advertised by Samsung,

their device is focused on the RAM, storage, and display features. It’s said that the Samsung Galaxy S10+ has up to 12GB of
RAM. And as we all know, the RAM is used for how many tasks a device can carry and not necessarily how fast it can

operate unlike the processor. Although clocking at a higher rate compared to the OnePlus devices, it seems as though

OnePlus utilizes the power of their chipset more. ​“Packed with power” is as they advertised but this sacrifices the features

in their media recording and display part. It’s also

With all that’s been said, it’s fair to say that Apple really does dominate the smartphone industry in terms of

chipset quality. To summarize everything I have come up with a table to see the different features of each device and I’m

limiting it to only one device per company.

Smartphone Chipset GeekBench GeekBench Price of

Score (Single Score Smartphone
Core) (Multicore) (in Php)
Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max A13 Bionic 1330 3435 73,990 to 95,990
@2.65-2.7GHz

Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G HiSilicon Kirin 768 3078 43,758.36 to

990@2.0 GHz 70,545.03

OnePlus 7T Pro Qualcomm 766 2713 22,500.00 to

Snapdragon 49,074.80
855+@1.8GHz

Samsung Galaxy S10 5G Samsung Exynos 761 2148 66,431 to 71,545

9820@2.0GHz

Sony Xperia 5 Qualcomm 731 2672 25,000

Snapdragon
855@1.8GHz

Vivo IQOO Pro 5G Qualcomm 744 2699 34,760.81

Snapdragon
855+@1.8GHz

Buying top of the line smartphones is never going to come at a cheap price. But you can’t argue with the

performance of Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro Max and its A13 Bionic chipset. If money isn’t an issue and you’re looking for a

premium smartphone, I highly recommend the latest flagship phone of Apple. It doesn’t disappoint with its high speed

performance and user-friendly software. That speed is going to be useful for gaming and graphic designing. Not to mention

you are also buying into the ecosystem of Apple wherein you now have access to iOS exclusive features. Security is one of

the biggest focuses of Apple recently that means it’s harder for jailbreaking and other complex third-party programming. If

you’re looking for a more budget friendly device but still works like a train, I recommend the Sony Xperia 5. Its operating is

Android, meaning it is more diverse and you can tweak it a bit more for your liking without the use of jailbreaking. In
conclusion, Apple does have the fastest chipset in the smartphone market but being able to experience its high-end speed

comes at a price.
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