Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs Apple A18: Benchmarks and Specs

Qualcomm's 2025 flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, is grabbing headlines and the company is touting it as the "world’s fastest mobile CPU". Since Apple's A-series mobile processors have always held the CPU crown, we have brought this benchmark comparison between the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Apple A18 to evaluate their performance across multiple tests. On that note, let's check out how they stack up on Geekbench and other tests.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs Apple A18: Geekbench Score

In an early Geekbench listing, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 scored 3,831 in single-core and 11,525 in multi-core. The Geekbench CPU test was conducted on the recently launched Xiaomi 17 Pro. Meanwhile, the Apple A18 processor, powering the iPhone 16, achieved 3,254 in single-core tasks and 8,070 in multi-core tasks.

Taken together, Qualcomm's latest processor, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is around 18% faster in single-core tasks and a whopping 43% faster in heavy, multi-core workloads. It shows that Qualcomm has indeed improved its 3rd-gen Oryon CPU both in terms of performance and efficiency. On top of that, the 8-core CPU on the 8 Elite Gen 5 helps the processor to take a huge lead in multi-threaded tasks.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs Apple A18: Specs Comparison

Since the Apple A18 came out last year, it's manufactured on TSMC's last-gen 3nm (N3E) process node, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is built on TSMC's refined 3nm (N3P) node. The 8 Elite Gen 5 packs its custom Oryon v3 CPU cores while the A18 features six Apple CPU cores.

The Oryon CPU can reach up to 4.60GHz and the Apple CPU has maximum frequency of 4.05GHz. On the graphics front, you have the powerful Adreno 840 GPU on the 8 Elite Gen 5 and the A18 comes with the 5-core Apple GPU.