iPhone 18 Pro Max compares processing speed with Galaxy S26 Ultra
(Dan Tri) - iPhone 18 Pro Max completed PhoneBuff's processing speed test about 12 seconds faster than the Galaxy S26 Ultra, thanks to shorter processing times in both rounds of testing.
iPhone 18 Pro Max and Galaxy S26 Ultra are two of the most high-end smartphones on the market today, considered typical representatives of the iOS and Android platforms. Both products possess powerful configurations leading the high-end segment.
At the time of product launch, Apple confidently declared that the A20 Pro chip developed by the company and equipped on the iPhone 18 Pro Max is the most powerful mobile chip today. The chip is manufactured on a 2nm process, with 6 processing cores, including 2 super high-performance processing cores (clocked up to 4.93GHz) and 4 high-performance processing cores.
Meanwhile, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, designed and optimized specifically for the Galaxy S26 product line. The chip is manufactured on a 3nm process, with 8 processing cores, reaching a maximum clock speed of 4.74GHz.
Compare detailed configuration between iPhone 18 Pro Max and Galaxy S26 Ultra (Click on the image to view large size).
iPhone 18 Pro Max has an advantage in processing speed and battery life because it has a lower screen resolution than the Galaxy S26 Ultra, meaning it takes less time and consumes less battery when processing graphics.
Are the above advantages enough to help iPhone 18 Pro Max surpass Galaxy S26 Ultra in the processing speed test? To find the answer, the YouTube channel PhoneBuff conducted a test to compare the processing speed of the two products when running the same tasks.
To ensure the fairness of its test, PhoneBuff used two specialized robotic arms to simultaneously open the same apps on the Galaxy S26 Ultra and iPhone 18 Pro Max.
When an application is launched, the robot arm will perform a few tasks on that application, then automatically return to the smartphone's main screen to activate the next application and so on until it runs 15 different applications, including social networking applications, games, filming/photography, office processing...
Once all 15 pre-prepared applications have been activated, PhoneBuff will calculate the total time it takes for both smartphones to run and finish processing all these applications.
After that, the robot arm will start reactivating previously launched applications to test the multitasking speed on each product.
The test results show that the iPhone 18 Pro Max needs 3 minutes and 30.75 seconds to launch all 15 applications for the first time, while the Galaxy S26 Ultra needs 3 minutes and 40.65 seconds to do the same. A difference in processing time of up to 10 seconds is a significant gap.
Notably, in round two, the iPhone 18 Pro Max only needed 29.37 seconds to reopen all applications, while the Galaxy S26 Ultra took 31.60 seconds to do this.
The final result, the iPhone 18 Pro Max won the processing speed test with a performance of 4 minutes and 0.12 seconds, while the Galaxy S26 Ultra took 4 minutes and 12.25 seconds for the same tasks.
iPhone 18 Pro Max compares processing speed with Galaxy S26 Ultra (Video: PhoneBuff).
Although the difference in results is not too much and PhoneBuff's test is only for reference because the actual processing speed on smartphone models depends on the user's usage, this result shows that Apple's A20 Pro chip is really as powerful as what "apple" announced.