Qualcomm jumps on a meme, forgets Apple's chips absolutely beast its own

Apple A
Apple A (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

  • Qualcomm's Snapdragon Twitter account has jumped onto a Twitter meme and suggested companies shouldn't make their own chips.
  • Someone forgot that Apple's own chips are very much faster than Qualcomm's Snapdragon.

Has anything good ever come from a company trying to get involved with a Twitter meme? Qualcomm's Snapdragon account, the one related to its own chips that are found in Android phones, is the latest to find out why companies should steer clear of this stuff. And it seems blissfully unaware.

Taking to Twitter to get involved with the whole red flag meme — and it went horribly wrong.

The red flag meme is pretty simple. People tweet red flag emojis and some text that should be a red flag. Told you it was simple.

And then, this happened.

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That would be cool and all, except there's one company that's very good at making SoC — System on Chip — right now. And it isn't Qualcomm making the Snapdragon.

It's Apple. Apple is the company making stellar SoC, absolutely beasting Snapdragon chips in the process. In fact, Snapdragon chips are so last year that even Google is making its own SoC now.

Just how bad is it? Here's how Anandtech describes the A15 Bionic beating at the heart of Apple's iPhone 13.

Compared to the competition, the A15 isn't +50 faster as Apple claims, but rather +62% faster. While Apple's larger cores are more power hungry, they're still a lot more energy efficient. Granted, we are seeing a process node disparity in favour of Apple. The performance and efficiency of the A15 E-cores also put to shame the rest of the pack. The extremely competent performance of the 4 efficiency cores alongside the leading performance of the 2 big cores explain the significantly better multi-threaded performance than the 1+3+4 setups of the competition.

Well OK then.

Maybe whoever's running the Snapdragon Twitter account should check out our collection of the best iPhones you can buy right now.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.