Android phone CPUs in the future might eventually outperform iPhone CPUs

In terms of single-core CPU power, iPhone chipsets have typically outperformed Android phone processors. It appears that Arm, the chip monarch, may challenge Apple in this area. According to a report from Moor Insights and Strategy, Arm could come forward with the most powerful smartphone CPU in the future. Reportedly, the company is working on a Cortex-X CPU that has been codenamed Blackhawk. If we go by the company’s history, it might be called the Cortex-X5.

The new CPU will offer the largest YoY IPC performance jump in 5 years, according to the report shared by the analyst firm. Perhaps a similar performance leap was observed in 2020 with the original Cortex-X1 CPU. Furthermore, the new CPU comes with “great” large language model (LLM) performance. In short, it will offer a significant boost for generative AI tasks.

This cutting-edge new CPU is presumably a component of Arm’s ambitious drive to “eliminate the performance gap between Arm-designed processors and custom Arm implementations.”

What does this imply for smartphones in 2025?

Well, this is theoretically easier to claim than practically. In recent years, significant CPU upgrades have been introduced to the Arm CPUs of Android phone processors. However, no significant upgrade was observed for single-core CPU performance. For this reason, Android smartphones fall behind Apple’s iPhone silicon. Thus, we’ll just have to wait and watch how this news plays out.

Moreover, there is another interesting factor concerning the Cortex-X5 CPU and its impact on battery life that must be considered. Ultimately, a performance surpassing Apple’s looks smaller compared to a phone with significantly lower durability. This is especially important now that MediaTek has completely abandoned its power-hungry little cores in favor of big and medium cores exclusively.

In addition to this, Qualcomm might not adopt this new CPU given the fact that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be based on Qualcomm’s custom Oryon CPU cores. MediaTek and Samsung, on the other hand, might adopt the new CPU for Dimensity 9400 and Exynos 2500.