Mikey Campbell
With the Galaxy S9 and S9+ now in the hands of tech reviewers, some are beginning to evaluate how Samsung's latest handsets stacks up against Apple's flagship iPhone X. One head-to-head shows the S9's Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 CPU, while speedy, is easily bested by Apple's A11 Bionic power plant.
In a series of tests, Tom's Guide pitted the Galaxy S9+ against iPhone X, last year's Galaxy Note 8, Huawei's Mate 10 Pro and the Google Pixel 2 XL. In all but one trial — a synthetic graphics test — Apple's custom silicon came out on top, and in a big way.
Starting with Geekbench, which provides a decent perspective of all-around system performance, iPhone X came in with a multi-core score of 10,357, while the S9+ placed a distant second with a score of 8,295.
Moving on to graphics, Samsung's smartphone managed a 3DMark Sling Shot score of 5,793, outperforming the 3,998 tally put in by iPhone X. Interestingly, iPhone bested the S9+ when running the OpenGL ES 3.0 benchmark in Unlimited mode, scoring 4,994 to Samsung's 4,634.
Apple's chip crushed the Qualcomm CPU in real-world testing, as the iPhone took a mere 42 seconds to transcode a two-minute 4K video file to 1080p using Adobe Premiere Clip. The Galaxy S9+ accomplished the same task in 2 minutes and 32 seconds, just 23 seconds faster than Google's Pixel 2 XL.
Still, the S9+ is a vast improvement over last year's Galaxy S8, which boasts a Snapdragon 835 processor. The year-old Galaxy model took over 4 minutes to complete the video editing test.
Finally, iPhone X took 13 seconds to open the game Injustice 2, a task that took the S9+ 20 seconds. At least part of the speed can be attributed to Apple's integrated software and hardware designs, which are crafted to complement each other.
Charles Martin
Marko Zivkovic
Mike Wuerthele
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
16 Comments
My level of surprise is at zero.
No need to gloat, this is a small point of interest for Apple users.
Does the S9 even beat the iPhone 7 with the A10 chip?
microsoft is planning to come out with Windows laptops with the 845 chip. It’s going to be another slow failure like the Surface 3.
This is why iPadPro is faster than entry level SurfacePro easily.
This also shows why Apple Should dump intel chip in MB and MBA.
The scores for the IPhone 7 & 8 should have been listed.
FYI: The 8 is basically the same as the X, the 7 is about 6000.
Still that’s an impressive improvement by Qualcomm. They’ve finally game a substantial beat on the IPhone 7.
Prior to this, people might has well purchased an IPhone 7 vs. the best Android had to offer (I think the price was similar).
Is there a SINGLE Android phone that ever got better benchmarks than an iPhone released after it? I don’t think so.