The smartphone is no longer a trivial mobile phone but a fully-fledged laptop, and for this to be possible, performance is needed. To have the scariest performance, you need the best processor inside any phone. And this is why smartphone processors, despite being components hidden inside the terminals, are among those most considered by connoisseurs when buying an Android device or an iPhone.
Just like with assembled PCs and notebooks, there are CPUs on mobile, although they are not manufactured by Intel and AMD. And depending on the smartphone offers you find, there are also different SoCs. Of course, the chipset is not everything to accurately establish the performance of a smartphone, just as the benchmarks are not. In fact, there is also RAM memory, optimization of the operating system and apps, the type of internal memory and more.
We therefore specify that it is not guaranteed that every mobile phone model with the same SoC will have the same or similar performance. But System On A Chip, another name used to identify chipsets, is the component that contributes the most to both cheaper and higher-end devices. We have compared the current SoCs, and through this guide, in addition to explaining what they are, we will show you the best smartphone processors with rankings and benchmarks.
However, we specify that the performance of a smartphone processor changes not only based on the brand (Qualcomm, MediaTek and so on) and the model of the SoC itself, but also based on the mobile phone model, because the rest of the components are never the same. same and they are not all optimized the same way.
The processor, also called SoC (System-on-a-Chip) in the case of mobile devices, is a piece of hardware that executes instructions: it processes software data through the operating system. It runs at a certain clock frequency (measured in GHz) and is made up of a certain number of cores which can be of different models themselves.
These are important performance parameters that help us understand its potential (the most popular SoCs are quad-core, hexa-core and octa-core and have 4, 6 and 8 cores respectively). Smartphone processors are the main determinants of the speed of a device and of how and how much it can handle any type of application. The more powerful the processor, the more the terminal will be able to perform better in terms of performance.
The SoC is also tasked with supporting several other components of the smartphone, including the camera and its megapixels. In mobile devices, the chipset not only includes the CPU, but also the GPU and the modem that is responsible for making Internet browsing possible via the data connection. Many cheap and top-of-the-range Chinese smartphones have become among the best sellers just for having powerful smartphone processors inside them, and after the explanations above you should now be able to understand why.
Major SoC Manufacturers
Among all the devices on sale, the most popular and even the most popular smartphone processors belong to 5 main manufacturers, which are the following.
Qualcomm: those of this company based in the United States are the most loved smartphone processors ever in the Android world, and they are called Snapdragon. They are often preferred for their better performance than the competition and because they are best suited to modding.
MediaTek: these smartphone processors are instead very popular among cheap smartphones with Android, and the field in which they prevail is that of low cost devices. In the high-end MediaTek has been crushed by competition from Qualcomm: the advantage of devices with this brand's processors is the fact that they cost less in general.
Apple: Apple's smartphone processors, physically produced mainly by TSMC, are present exclusively on Apple's iPhones and iPads. They are always very powerful because they are all made to be high-end, and have never had poor performance.
Samsung: These smartphone processors instead are found on Samsung Galaxy devices and are called Exynos, but occasionally Samsung may collaborate with other companies to insert them on their terminals. For example, this has already happened with several Meizu smartphones. Samsung produces both budget and top-of-the-range smartphone processors: the former can be found on Galaxy J and A series terminals, the latter on the Galaxy S and Note.
Huawei: Huawei's smartphone processors are called Kirin, and are found on Huawei and Honor devices. Also in this case there are cheap and high-end ones, but at the moment they are not present on other devices besides those mentioned above.
Summary smartphone processor ranking
The following is the top 10 of the best smartphone processors ever for performance power. The ranking does not take into account prices but only performance and benchmarks, so it is based exclusively on the power of the SoCs. Some of them may no longer be on the market and could only be found if you buy used smartphones, but we have mentioned them anyway because they remain among the most powerful.