The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Ultra could be in line for a healthy performance boost over the iPhone 14 Pro.
If the iPhone 14 Pro was disappointing in one way, it was a fairly modest performance bump over the iPhone 13 Pro before it. The A16 Bionic is a highly capable chip, but only represents a 10% increase over the A15 Bionic.
Apple could be set to address a perceived slowing down of its processor progress with the A17 Bionic, at least if claimed benchmark tests are to be believed.
Chinese website DCInside (via Notebookcheck) has supplied some alleged Geekbench 6 benchmarks for the forthcoming A17 Bionic. The results are impressive, if accurate. Scores of 3019 single-core and 7860 multi-core represent a 20 percent bump over the iPhone 14 Pro.
To place those numbers into another context, I recently put the Xiaomi 13 Pro with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip (the best chip that Android has to offer right now) through the Geekbench 6 ringer, and found that it scored around 1420 single-core and 5210 multi-core.
One of the keys to the Apple A17 Bionic’s success could be the suggestion that it will be built on TSMC’s 3nm process. The A16 Bionic is a 4nm chip, just like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Using a smaller production standard in this way makes for a more efficient chip, which in turn lets you crank out improved performance without the same penalty to battery life.
Naturally, with these benchmark tests being unsubstantiated, and with the iPhone 15 Pro being a good 6 months out from release, we shouldn’t take these performance benchmarks as being nailed on, but we wouldn’t count them out.