Friday, September 15th 2023
Apple A17 Pro SoC Within Reach of Intel i9-13900K in Single-Core Performance
An Apple "iPhone16,1" was put through the Geekbench 6.2 gauntlet earlier this week—according to database info this pre-retail sample was running a build of iOS 17.0 (currently in preview) and its logic board goes under the "D83AP" moniker. It is interesting to see a unit hitting the test phase only a day after the unveiling of Apple's iPhone 15 Pro and Max models—the freshly benched candidate seems to house an A17 Pro system-on-chip. The American tech giant has set lofty goals for said flagship SoC, since it is "the industry's first 3-nanometer chip. Continuing Apple's leadership in smartphone silicon, A17 Pro brings improvements to the entire chip, including the biggest GPU redesign in Apple's history. The new CPU is up to 10 percent faster with microarchitectural and design improvements, and the Neural Engine is now up to 2x faster."
Tech news sites have pored over the leaked unit's Geekbench 6.2 scores—its A17 Pro chipset (TSMC N3) surpasses the previous generation A16 Bionic (TSMC N4) by 10% in single-core stakes. Apple revealed this performance uplift during this week's iPhone "Wonderlust" event, so the result is not at all surprising. The multi-score improvement is a mere ~3%, suggesting that only minor tweaks have been made to the underlying microarchitecture. The A17 Pro beats Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in both categories—2914 vs. 2050 (SC) and 7199 vs. 5405 (MC) respectively. Spring time leaks indicated that the "A17 Bionic" was able to keep up with high-end Intel and AMD desktop CPUs in terms of single-core performance—the latest Geekbench 6.2 entry semi-confirms those claims. The A17 Pro's single-threaded performance is within 10% of Intel Core i9-13900K and Ryzen 9 7950X processors. Naturally, Apple's plucky mobile chip cannot put up a fight in the multi-core arena, additionally Tom's Hardware notes another catch: "A17 Pro operates at 3.75 GHz, according to the benchmark, whereas its mighty competitors work at about 5.80 GHz and 6.0 GHz, respectively."
Tech news sites have pored over the leaked unit's Geekbench 6.2 scores—its A17 Pro chipset (TSMC N3) surpasses the previous generation A16 Bionic (TSMC N4) by 10% in single-core stakes. Apple revealed this performance uplift during this week's iPhone "Wonderlust" event, so the result is not at all surprising. The multi-score improvement is a mere ~3%, suggesting that only minor tweaks have been made to the underlying microarchitecture. The A17 Pro beats Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in both categories—2914 vs. 2050 (SC) and 7199 vs. 5405 (MC) respectively. Spring time leaks indicated that the "A17 Bionic" was able to keep up with high-end Intel and AMD desktop CPUs in terms of single-core performance—the latest Geekbench 6.2 entry semi-confirms those claims. The A17 Pro's single-threaded performance is within 10% of Intel Core i9-13900K and Ryzen 9 7950X processors. Naturally, Apple's plucky mobile chip cannot put up a fight in the multi-core arena, additionally Tom's Hardware notes another catch: "A17 Pro operates at 3.75 GHz, according to the benchmark, whereas its mighty competitors work at about 5.80 GHz and 6.0 GHz, respectively."