iPhone 13 Pro and Pixel 6 Pro: in speed tests, Google’s smartphone is surprising

Google launched its first Android smartphones equipped with a homemade chip, the SoC Tensor. Google is therefore joining Apple, Samsung and also Huawei. How does the Google Tensor chip fare against its competitors? In synthetic benchmarks, this is not the best, but it can also be very surprising.

The punch of the Google Pixel 6 Pro // Source: Anthony Wonner – Frandroid

The speed tests are interesting to analyze. This consists of successively launching a series of applications to compare the charging speeds of two smartphones. This test makes it possible to evaluate the behavior of the SoC, and more precisely of the CPU, and of the RAM. There are also some subtleties in the way the OS will handle background applications to optimize RAM usage.

With the recent release of theiPhone 13 Pro and more recently from Google Pixel 6 Pro, two new ARM SoCs have been introduced to the market. On the one hand, the Apple A15 Bionic, on the other, the Google Tensor.

The Google Tensor is not good at synthetic benchmarks

When we look at the synthetic benchmarks, Apple manages to place itself ahead of all its competitors, including the Snapdragon 888 that we have in the Galaxy S21 Ultra for example. Not surprisingly, Apple has a head start with its in-house ARM chip. Google, for its part, has introduced a brand new in-house chip called Tensor. This chip does not have a more powerful CPU than the Snapdragon 888, it is even theoretically less powerful.

Which logically gives poorer results in synthetic benchmarks, like that of Geekbench 5. The Pixel 6 Pro does better than smartphones equipped with a Snapdragon 888 in single-core, but less well in multi-core. While the comparison to the iPhone 13’s A15 Bionic does not hold up, Apple is far ahead. We could even have fun comparing the Google Tensor to the Apple A13 of iphone xs. Remember that the iPhone XS was announced in 2019 …

Source: iGen

In speed tests, Google is doing well

Let’s move on to speed tests which have very different requirements from synthetic benchmarks. In a video posted on YouTube, it turns out that the Pixel 6 Pro is quite surprising. As you can see in the screenshot below, the iPhone 13 Pro did better by around 5 seconds in the protocol put in place of successively opening apps and games. The gap is not huge, but it remains significant.

When we look in detail, we notice that the Google Tensor initially loaded the applications faster than the A15 Bionic. The iPhone is back in front of resource-intensive applications.

The Google Tensor opened basic applications like Amazon, Facebook, Word, Excel or the camera. On the more demanding games and apps, the iPhone is in the lead. Nevertheless, these are very encouraging results for Google which show that the results of synthetic benchmarks should not be only the only comparison data. It also means the Pixel 6s are almost as fast as the iPhone 13 in actual use.

YouTube linkSubscribe to Frandroid