The Fastest Phone You Can Buy In The US Isn't Made By Apple

Historically, when it comes down to picking an Android phone or an iPhone, power and performance aren't necessarily at the top of the list for most people. That being said, for nerds like me, performance numbers are interesting. For even deeper-dive nerds, these numbers are everything.

Apple has also historically outshined Android in this department. Not only does Apple build everything in the iPhone from the ground up in order to optimize everything about the user experience, typically resulting in superior performance and reliability, but Apple's processors have always just had more raw power to work with. The A-series of Apple chips has always beaten the best processors that Android has had to offer.

So, when I went to Snapdragon Summit last month and saw the Snapdragon 8 Elite processors, I certainly raised my eyebrows. When the reference hardware outshined the iPhone 16 Pro Max during the benchmarking session, I was cautiously optimistic that Apple's reign may be coming to an end. (Optimistic actually isn't the right word — I don't have a horse in this race.) 

All the same, I wanted to wait until I could get my hands on a phone that a customer could actually buy before drawing final conclusions. Reference hardware could potentially be built to optimize processor performance above all, even at the expense of the user experience.

We recently reviewed both the OnePlus 13 and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, both of which use that processor. For the purposes of this test, I went with the Samsung phone and I'm happy to report that the new processor comes as advertised. 

For testing, I fired up a couple of benchmark apps. Benchmarks are apps designed to push a phone's CPU and GPU pretty hard — harder than most normal processing tasks. It runs the processors through a number of tasks and compiles the results into a number or score. You can then use this score to gauge a device's performance against another device to see which has more power

Geekbench 6 and 3DMark's Wild Life Stress Test are my usual standbys. I ran Geekbench three times and averaged the results. I did not run the stress test three times because it's a 20-minute test. There are any number of benchmarks I could choose, but these two are typically the ones I use to gauge performance and they're both available on iOS and Android. So, let's get to the numbers.

On Geekbench 6, the single core score is the only one in which Apple came out on top. Apple's single and multi-core scores were 3,456 and 8,440. Meanwhile, on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, you get 3,106 and 9,792 scores.

Over on the 3DMark stress test, things got a little more interesting. Apple scores 10,011 on its best loop, and its lowest loop score was 9,685. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra meanwhile scored 24,512 on the best loop and 13,074 on its lowest loop. These scores are not really close.

Clearly, the Snapdragon 8 Elite beats Apple's A18 Pro processor. Does that mean that the phones themselves are faster? The answer is complicated, but it boils down to "maybe." Arguably, these scores are higher for the Android phones, but Apple builds its phones from scratch — soup to nuts. That allows Apple to optimize its hardware and software to work together.

Android doesn't really have that luxury. Samsung was quick to point out the "for Galaxy" part of its processor name. This isn't the first time a Samsung phone processor has borne the "for Galaxy" addendum. According to Samsung, the company worked with Qualcomm to build the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor with a brand-new application processor. To a certain extent, Samsung also built its hardware and software to work together. But there are two caveats to that.

First, Apple really controls the entire process from start to finish — Samsung still has to rely on outside parties to outfit its phones. So, the optimizations likely won't be as complete as what Apple can accomplish.

Second, smartphones across the board have gotten so ridiculously fast that it doesn't really matter if an app opens six nanoseconds faster on one device or the other. The only way this really starts to matter is when you are pushing your phone to its absolute limit. Gaming, editing and exporting 4K video, and things of that nature are really the only activities that will make this matter.

The last place this might matter is future-proofing. The faster the processor, the longer your phone will be able to stand up to whatever comes in the future. We don't know what the future will bring, but the faster processor should (theoretically) be better prepared.