iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro benchmarks confirm that the chip is indeed 10% faster in CPU performance and up to 20% in GPU performance compared to its predecessor, A16 Bionic. The 3nm chip has been put to the test as per leaked Geekbench benchmarks which confirm that both single-core and multi-core CPU performance have improvements of up to 12%. GFXBench benchmarks have also appeared which show up to 20% performance improvements on average.
This is in line with Apple’s claims during the iPhone 15 Pro launch event, where the company said that the CPU in the new A17 Pro chip is 10% faster while the GPU is 20% faster.
A17 Pro benchmarks
The new benchmarks show that Apple still maintains its lead over the latest and greatest Android smartphone chips. Compared to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, even the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro outperformed it in Geekbench, while the latest iPhone 15 Pro almost doubles its single-core performance. It’s astonishing how the competition still lags behind Apple when it comes to chip performance.
Before we dive into the numbers, here is a brief look at the specifications of the new chip:
Tech specs
- CPU Cores: 6
- Performance cores: 2
- Efficiency cores: 4
- CPU Frequency: 3.77 GHz
- L1 cache: 128 KB
- L2 cache: 4 MB
- GPU Cores: 8
- Neural Engine Cores: 16
- RAM: 8GB (This is important as iPhone 14 Pro models had 6GB RAM)
Here are the Geekbench scores:
Single-core
- Galaxy S23 Ultra (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip) – 1480
- iPhone 13 Pro (A15 Bionic chip) – 1738
- iPhone 14 Pro (A16 Bionic chip) – 2520
- iPhone 15 Pro (A17 Pro chip) – 2914
Multi-core
- Galaxy S23 Ultra (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip) – 4584
- iPhone 13 Pro (A15 Bionic chip) – 4874
- iPhone 14 Pro (A16 Bionic chip) – 6387
- iPhone 15 Pro (A17 Pro chip) – 7199
In terms of single-core performance, the A17 Pro actually outperforms Apple’s own M1 chip, used in iPad Pro and Mac, however, it performs slightly slower when it comes to multi-core, primarily due to the number of cores (6 vs 8).
- Single-core: 1707
- Multi-core: 7395
Even though Apple talked a big game about the GPU performance, which is 20% faster than before, the above numbers show that the jump to the 3nm manufacturing process has yielded definite performance improvements. As of now, it is unclear whether this will also result in improved battery performance, but we would not be surprised to see it outperform the A16 Bionic chip-equipped iPhone 14 Pro models.
GFXBench
Aztec Ruins High Tier Offscreen
- iPhone 15 Pro: 60.7fps
- iPhone 15 Pro Max: 56.8fps
- iPhone 14 Pro: 47.9fps
- iPhone 14 Pro Max: 40.2fps
Aztec Ruins Normal Tier Offscreen test
- iPhone 15 Pro: 165fps
- iPhone 15 Pro Max: 115.3fps
- iPhone 14 Pro: 114fps
- iPhone 14 Pro Max: 111.4fps
Manhattan 3.1 Offscreen test
- iPhone 15 Pro: 199.8 fps
- iPhone 14 Pro: 151.9fps
Considering that it features hardware ray tracing support, AV1 code decoding, ProRes video decoding, and almost 20% better performance than its predecessor, we would not be surprised to see reviewers put it through the tests. The GPU is also enabling developers to release actual console games on the platform so we will have direct comparisons in terms of performance and visuals between iPhone and other consoles.
We cannot help but wonder how good the upcoming 3nm M3 chip for iPad and Mac will be with an increased number of cores and an even more powerful GPU.
Read more:
- M2 Ultra benchmarks reveal 20% faster performance than M1 Ultra
- Fresh benchmarks of M2 Max chip reveal performance jump from M1 Max chip
- A16 on iPhone 14 Pro benchmarks: Geekbench, AnTuTu, and more
- M2 MacBook Air benchmarks show same performance as new 13-inch MacBook Pro
- Apple’s M2 chip benchmarks show up to 20% improvement over M1
- M1 Ultra benchmarks versus Intel 12900K, AMD 5950x and Xeon W
- iPhone 13 destroys Galaxy S22 in performance benchmarks
- Apple’s M1 Max outperforms Intel Core i7-12700H in Geekbench benchmarks
