iPhone 8 A11 Bionic CPU Edged-Out By Galaxy Note 8 In Real World Tests Due To RAM Starvation

Apple fans are not going to like this, but despite all of the hype surrounding the company's custom A11 Bionic processor, Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 is faster than the iPhone 8 Plus in real-world usage, according to a series of app loading tests. The results run counter to what we have seen in previously leaked benchmarks, in which the A11 Bionic trounced the competition.

In a leaked Geekbench test run, for example, the A11 Bionic-powered iPhone X posted a single-core score of 4,061 points and a multi-core score of 9,959 points, putting it well ahead of every Android phone we have tested to date, including ones powered by Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 835 SoC. However, synthetic benchmarks do not always translate over to real-world performance.


For several years now, PhoneBuff has been running speed tests that consist of opening apps and measuring load times. In the past, the iPhone has performed really well against Android devices in these tests. The latest bout featured an iPhone 8 Plus going up against the Galaxy Note 8, but this time it was a different result. Through two "laps" consisting of a total of 16 apps, the Galaxy Note 8 proved the slightly faster handset overall.

The iPhone 8 Plus started off well by finishing the first lap 3 seconds ahead of the Galaxy Note 8, but trailed by 6 seconds in the second set of tests in which the previous apps were revisited. What this boiled down to is the Galaxy Note 8 having twice as much RAM—6GB versus 3GB. This allowed the Galaxy Note 8 to retain more open apps in the background, whereas the iPhone 8 Plus has to re-open more of them from scratch.


This type of testing method is not perfect, and granted, users are not likely to bounce around between 16 apps within a couple of minutes. However, it does illustrate that synthetic testing is not necessarily a barometer of how a phone will actually perform. Even with the iPhone 8 Plus being slightly faster in the first round of tests, the gap in performance was small, versus disparity seen in the Geekbench run.

The good news here for fans of either phone is that the iPhone 8 Plus and Galaxy Note 8 are both hotrods in the handset category. Our advice is to roll with what you like and ignore the haters.

Thumbnail Image Source: YouTube via PhoneBuff