iPhone 15 Pro Geekbench Scores Confirm Apple's Faster A17 Pro Chip Performance Claims, 8GB of RAM

[MacRumors]

The first Geekbench scores for the iPhone 15 Pro have confirmed Apple's performance improvement claims for its new A17 Pro chip over last year's A16 Bionic chipset found in the iPhone 14 Pro.

As spotted by MySmartPrice, the benchmarking platform has recorded an iPhone 15 Pro tested in the wild with the model number iPhone 16,1 and a six-core CPU with a base frequency of 3.78GHz.

In the test result, the device scored 2,908 and 7,238 points in the single-core and multi-core tests, while last year's iPhone 14 Pro scored 2,642 and 6,739, respectively.

Meanwhile, an iPhone 15 Pro Max with the model number iPhone 16,2 scored 2,846 and 7,024 points in the single-core and multi-core tests respectively. That also compares favorably to last years iPhone 14 Pro Max, which scored 2,546 and 6,631 points in the same respective tests.

The Geekbench results also recorded 8GB of RAM for both iPhone 15 Pro models, compared to 6GB of RAM in last year's Pro models, corroborating previous reporting.

Apple's A17 Pro chip is made with a first-of-its-kind 3-nanometer process. The A17 Pro has a six-core CPU, for 10% faster CPU performance and 20% faster GPU performance. It also has a two-times faster 16-core neural engine to accelerate machine learning such as more accurate autocorrect or pulling a subject from an image. It can process up to 35 trillion operations per second.

In addition, the A17 Pro contains a brand new GPU with an Apple-designed shader architecture. Apple says it is the biggest redesign in the history of Apple GPUs, with a focus on performance and efficiency, running complex applications, and new rendering features.

The ‌iPhone 15 Pro‌ starts at $999 for 128GB of storage, while the ‌iPhone 15 Pro‌ Max starts at $1,199 for 256GB of storage. All of the new iPhone 15 models are available to pre-order starting Friday, September 15, and will launch on Friday, September 22 in more than 40 countries and regions around the world.

Article Link: iPhone 15 Pro Geekbench Scores Confirm Apple's Faster A17 Pro Chip Performance Claims, 8GB of RAM

 

[contacos]

I wonder how the naming of the chips will work next generation.

Will the iPhone 16 receive a non "Pro" A17 chip while the iPhone 16 Pro will simply receive a minor bump of the existing A17 Pro? Or is it going to be A17 and A18 Pro chip at the same time? Sounds weird

 

[timmyh]

A17 Pro / A17 Pro Bionic perhaps?

 

[MayaUser]

So this is just gain from clock speed increase...not that impressive from this point of view
But for the Gpu is impressive...20% gain , hardware ray tracing

 

[abatabia]

I don’t know, after all the talk all year about this chip, perhaps I was expecting more?

And can some explain ray tracing to me?

 

[Boeingfan]

I wonder how the naming of the chips will work next generation.

Will the iPhone 16 receive a non "Pro" A17 chip while the iPhone 16 Pro will simply receive a minor bump of the existing A17 Pro? Or is it going to be A17 and A18 Pro chip at the same time? Sounds weird

I think the poverty pack 16 will receive the amateur chip and the pro max will receive the pro chip. Or maybe they could call the base chip a Celeron 😂

 

[Kiwamu]

I wonder how the naming of the chips will work next generation.

Will the iPhone 16 receive a non "Pro" A17 chip while the iPhone 16 Pro will simply receive a minor bump of the existing A17 Pro? Or is it going to be A17 and A18 Pro chip at the same time? Sounds weird

I assume the iPhone 16 will get a A17 with lesser cores. On the desktop side of things you sometimes harvest faulty cores but can disable them and sell them as a different (lesser) sku (see various tiers of chips from intel and amd); which means they can use those faulty cores as base iPhone 16 A17 chip. This is has two upsides for Apples

a) They can use all / most of the yield of production and
b) The Pro still has an edge towards the next phone next year

They now dig deeper to intensify the FOMO of the Pro, if you opt for a base iPhone, knowing most of them really don't need that much of performance.

Apple surely wants to convince more buyers to get the Pro and they do that with having more exclusive features and now even a harder chip. Gone are the days, when you get all / most of the new frills with the newest base iPhone.

 

[MayaUser]

I don’t know, after all the talk all year about this chip, perhaps I was expecting more?

And can some explain ray tracing to me?

the talk was about the base Apple Silicon A17 N3B...because the scaling is even more important
Now we know the whole M3 family will support ray tracing and higher clock speeds, AV1 codec is also good and also based on scaling the M3 Ultra can be something great (not to mention that even the M3 Max is suppose to go for more power than something on the even side like the M1 and M2 Max were)

 

[applepotato666]

I wonder how the naming of the chips will work next generation.

Will the iPhone 16 receive a non "Pro" A17 chip while the iPhone 16 Pro will simply receive a minor bump of the existing A17 Pro? Or is it going to be A17 and A18 Pro chip at the same time? Sounds weird

I can see them going with A17 non-Pro next year that doesn't have some Pro features like ray tracing and perhaps omits a GPU core like a binned variant of the A17 Pro. Anything to separate the regular iPhone from the Pro. Not a fan of non-Pro variants coming with last year's chip and the implications that may have for software support. I think in the future we'll see Pro variants getting the new iOS the year the peasant edition gets dropped.
Or perhaps they could be looking into aligning the versions (say next year we get A18 and A18 Pro) where the A18 is a binned version of the A18 Pro that omits a GPU core and has less RAM etc.

 

[Kiwamu]

I think in the future we'll see Pro variants getting the new iOS the year the peasant edition gets dropped.
Or perhaps they could be looking into aligning the versions (say next year we get A18 and A18 Pro) where the A18 is a binned version of the A18 Pro that omits a GPU core and has less RAM etc.

I hope it's the latter. Right now if feels like Apple trying its hardest to sell more Pro units.

 

[winxmac]

2016 - A10 (Fusion)
2017 - A11 Bionic
2018 - A12 Bionic
2019 - A13 Bionic
2020 - A14 Bionic
2021 - A15 Bionic
2022 - A16 Bionic
2023 - A17 Pro

It's weird that they changed the suffix/descriptive part of the chipset just this year (2023) when they should have done it back in 2020 just like how they introduced 5G and flattened the sides of the iPhones from that year...

 

[thegerman]

Next year we get the A18 Ultra in the 16 Ultra, can’t wait !

 

[FastLaneJB]

I know some are a bit disappointed with the speed increases here though they aren’t bad. What isn’t talked about and is obviously a big focus for Apple is the Machine Learning part of the chip where they doubled the performance. They obviously feel this is where it makes more sense to invest in performance improvements.

I kind of agree as this can open new features and capabilities not possible before. There’s quite a few new software features being added these days that are driven by those parts of the chips. Things that might help sell more phones vs 10% more CPU performance on a phone that no one I’ve ever come across says is too slow.

 

[airtonvfilho]

why does the pro has better results than pro max?

 

[gpat]

I wonder how the naming of the chips will work next generation.

Will the iPhone 16 receive a non "Pro" A17 chip while the iPhone 16 Pro will simply receive a minor bump of the existing A17 Pro? Or is it going to be A17 and A18 Pro chip at the same time? Sounds weird

A17 will probably be binned version of A17P.

 

[Cobold]

why does the pro has better results than pro max?

They are using the same processor at the same speeds but the Pro Max has a higher resolution and thus more pixels to push around
That has always been the case and I keep asking myself why they wouldn't simply clock the Max variant a little higher, but it is as it is.

 

[Skyscraperfan]

So you have six instead of five GPU cores and get 20% more performance? That is unexpected.

 

[GeoStructural]

Gone are the days, when you get all / most of the new frills with the newest base iPhone.

Wow, I never thought a comment on a tech thread would make me nostalgic. Yeah, I remember those days 😐.

 

[iBluetooth]

I assume the iPhone 16 will get a A17 with lesser cores. On the desktop side of things you sometimes harvest faulty cores but can disable them and sell them as a different (lesser) sku (see various tiers of chips from intel and amd); which means they can use those faulty cores as base iPhone 16 A17 chip. This is has two upsides for Apples

a) They can use all / most of the yield of production and
b) The Pro still has an edge towards the next phone next year

They now dig deeper to intensify the FOMO of the Pro, if you opt for a base iPhone, knowing most of them really don't need that much of performance.

Apple surely wants to convince more buyers to get the Pro and they do that with having more exclusive features and now even a harder chip. Gone are the days, when you get all / most of the new frills with the newest base iPhone.

It's also about the cost. The new Apple A17 are manufactured on the 3nm TSMC process, which is much more expensive than the previous process for A16. So, it makes a lot of sense to keep the A16, as that chip still blows the competition away and delivers excellent performance. It can also be that TSMC didn't have the capacity to manufacture so many chips, that they could use them in all the phones, as Apple it the first customer on this process node, but I guess it's more of the cost issue.

 

[Nozuka]

I hope it's the latter. Right now if feels like Apple trying its hardest to sell more Pro units.

Honestly doesn't seem like they need to try that hard...

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Ray tracing is the very last thing id expect from a phone tbh

Shoulda focused on battery and Npu tbh , GPU is, afaik, not that used or useful in such easily throttling devices

 

[boak]

I wonder how the naming of the chips will work next generation.

Will the iPhone 16 receive a non "Pro" A17 chip while the iPhone 16 Pro will simply receive a minor bump of the existing A17 Pro? Or is it going to be A17 and A18 Pro chip at the same time? Sounds weird

My bet is A17. Pro variant is reserved for GPU with hardware ray tracing.

Number of cores will be the same. 14 Pro and 15 have A16 with the same number of cores. Binning only make sense when both products have the same chip simultaneously.

 

[Kiwamu]

It's also about the cost. The new Apple A17 are manufactured on the 3nm TSMC process, which is much more expensive than the previous process for A16. So, it makes a lot of sense to keep the A16, as that chip still blows the competition away and delivers excellent performance. It can also be that TSMC didn't have the capacity to manufacture so many chips, that they could use them in all the phones, as Apple it the first customer on this process node, but I guess it's more of the cost issue.

Well, it is surely a decision Apple made and they could have planned for a smoother transition. I.e., they could have made sure that the base iPhone had an A17 chip and the pro the A17 Pro.

Also this argument does hold only water if you ignore that the iPhone 14 did not receive the A16 (which was just last year) and which was not on the 3nm node. So it was / is a willful decision by Apple to withhold the newest chip on the base iPhone and seems now a trend from the iPhone 14 going further.

 

[iBluetooth]

So you have six instead of five GPU cores and get 20% more performance? That is unexpected.

The GPU Clusters have a lot of cores in them, so you can't compare the number of clusters

 

[kiranmk2]

Very disappointing gains given the move to 3 nm. ~9% increase in performance core clock speed giving ~10% single core boost and 7% multicore boost. Plus (as has been commented on above), 20% more GPU cores giving a 20% GPU speed boost... Taking into account the rumours from the last year about how the A16 was supposed to have ray tracing but it was dropped late in development due to too much power consumption this is starting to look to me like the A17 is just the original A16 envisioned with the power savings from the 3 nm process sacrificed to the power hungry hardware ray-tracing GPUs. I wonder if battery life will be better than stated unless using ray tracing...

Lots of talk in the Apple Silicon forum about whether M3 is based on A16 or A17 - could it be that A16 and A17 are the same (with just ML cores, ray tracing and USB 3.0 in A17)?

In terms of the iPhone 16 SoC - I've read that the current 3 nm process is a stepping stone before the more scalable second gen 3 nm process and that the differences mean you can't just switch a chip from one process to the other, meaning Apple would have to redesign the chip anyway for the second gen process. Whether they chose to redesign the A17 Pro or just design two versions of the A18 will probably come down to a battle between the financial interests of saving money on the production line (i.e. using binned chips for the regular/pro phones) vs "encouraging" people to buy the Pro models through having a higher SoC generation than the non-Pro.