The first seemingly legitimate tests of Apple’s new A18 Pro chip have apparently leaked, and they show a healthy performance boost that should keep Apple at the top of the smartphone performance charts for some time to come.
The Geekbench 6 ranking for “iPhone17.2” means we’re looking at the performance numbers for an iPhone 16 Pro Max, and therefore the A18 Pro chip. The CPU score shows a single-core performance of 3,409 and a multi-core performance of 8,492. The GPU benchmark, which measures the performance of the Metal API for GPU compute tasks and not 3D graphics rendering performance reached 32,848.
How does this compare to other products? That’s an 18% improvement in CPU performance, both single-core and multi-core, over the typical benchmarks of the A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pro Max. That phone averages 2,887 single-core and 7,158 multi-core on Geekbench 6. The GPU compute score for the iPhone 15 Pro Max is 26,976, making the A18 Pro about 21% faster.
For more context, the M1 MacBook Air has a single-core score of 2,342 and a multi-core score of 8,350, with eight Processor cores.
Single-core score is faster than anything else out there:
- The Galaxy S24 Ultra tops the Android benchmark charts with a single-core score of 2,145 and a multi-core score of 6,702. It falls far short of the A18 Pro.
- Even Mac benchmarks can’t match that single-core performance, as the M3 Max scores 3,128. Its multi-core score of nearly 19,000 is due to the fact that it has 14 cores.
- Similarly, the PC processor rankings culminate with the Intel Core i9-13900KS, which posted a single-core score of 3,140 and a multi-core score of 21,802 (24 cores, 32 threads).
In other words, the iPhone 16 Pro models will deliver faster single-core CPU performance (as measured by Geekbench 6) than any processor on the market (desktop, laptop, phone, PC, or Mac), and multi-core performance comparable to a laptop processor from four years ago with 2 more cores. Likewise, the GPU is about as good at compute tasks as an M1 with 8 GPU cores.
That’s right, the iPhone 16 Pro has the same RAM, GPU performance, multi-core CPU performance, and more. better single-core processor performance, higher than the MacBook Air M1.
When this architecture appears in the M series, we can probably expect single-core scores of around 3,500 and multi-core scores of around 13,000 for an 8-core CPU. A 10-core GPU design like the one found in the MacBook Air will likely score 54,000 or higher, which would put it around 15% faster than the M3’s GPU.
