Apple A14 in 'iPhone 12' said to be as fast as the iPad Pro

Geekbench scores that may be for the next iPhone processor, the "A14," have surfaced online, and show massive jumps in multi-core performance and speed.

Apple improves on their A-series processors every year for each new iPhone release, so a successor to the current iPhone 11 A13 chipset is expected in the fall of 2020. Each year as the iPhone flagship release approaches, benchmark scores for said to be from the new processor in the device start to populate popular benchmark tools, like Geekbench.

The A12X (left) vs the supposed "A14" (right)

It is expected that the "iPhone 12" will have improved performance, and these scores show massive gains year-over-year. Apple has been seeing huge gains in their chipsets despite the rest of the industry hitting a bit of a performance wall.

New Geekbench testing, discovered by AppleInsider purporting to be from the A14 processor shows the first A-series processor to cross the 3.0 GHz mark.

The 12.9-inch iPad Pro has an A12X chipset with 8 cores and scores 1110 on a single core, and 4568 on the multi-core. The scores for the alleged A14 go beyond even that.

Single core performance of the device shows a 1658 score, with a 4612 multi-core score. This indicates a huge gain in its overall performance and will make multitasking and navigating apps smoother than ever.

Apple is also rumored to be developing an ARM Mac that could debut as early as this winter. A chip derived from the A14 would make for a good base laptop processor as well, but performance this high would also be beneficial for complex tasks like AR rendering or better image processing in a phone.

50 Comments

tht 5582 comments · 23 Years

About 4 years ago

rob53 said:

What about GPU performance? Is it good enough for an ARM Mac?

They won't be using the phone SoC in a Mac. They might use an iPad Pro SoC in a Mac. If this follows the typical pattern of AX processors in iPad Pros relative to A processors in iPhones, you can multiply the single core score by 1.1x, the multi-core score by 1.5x, and the GPU compute score by 2x.

That is more than good enough for Macs, with the necessary modifications. It needs to support 16 GB to 128 GB RAM, 4 to 8 TB of storage, and have 24 lanes of PCIe 3 or 16 lanes of PCIe 4. The CPU performance is more than good enough for all Apple laptops and desktops. Look at the single core score. That's i9-9900K territory in a phone. Give it 4 to 16 CPU cores, it can be used in the entire Mac desktop lineup, except for the Mac Pro, in which case, there needs to be a 32 core model and 1 TB memory support. The higher end laptops and desktops will use discrete GPUs, hence the need for PCIe, just like it is today.

If the single core score is true, that is the single core performance of Intel and AMD top end desktop processors in a phone. If it is true.

rob53 3299 comments · 13 Years

About 4 years ago

I keep seeing people complaining about the single core speed because “most apps only use a single core” so is there any way Apple could come up with a 4-5Ghz CPU?

How much does it cost Apple to add more cores? Could they add a second CPU chip to do this? How difficult or easy will it be to add PCIe and various I/O to their ARM bus? How close is the A-series architecture to what Apple would need for an ARM Mac?

Beats 3073 comments · 4 Years

About 4 years ago

I thought the "X" series were just a souped up version of the number next to it, sitting the A12X between the A12 and A13.