Malcolm Owen
A benchmark leak claiming to be for the upcoming A17 chip claim that the iPhone 15 Pro will be extremely powerful — but there are big reasons to be skeptical.
As the generations change, Apple's chips get faster and more powerful, which is visualized in benchmark results. However, sometimes the results can be a little too high to be realistic.
One such leak arrived on Monday, in a post by "@Tech_Reve" republishing details from Weibo. The information was apparently Geekbench scores for the A17 chip, the next step in Apple's mobile chip series expected to land in the iPhone 15 Pro models.
According to the tweet, the A17 running in Geekbench 6 scored 3,019 points in the single-core test, and 7,860 on the multi-core version.
While the A17 is expected to be on the new 3nm process with speed and efficiency improvements, these numbers still seemunrealistic, at least when compared to scores of previous A-series generations.
For a start, the 3,019 score is over 500 more than the current-top A16 Bionic chip in the iPhone 14 Pro, a 20.6% jump in performance year-on-year. However, looking at the A14 against the A13 and the A13 against the A12, the jumps are 10.8% and 10.6% respectively.
The multi-core score has the same issue, but is a little bit higher at a 24% year-on-year jump, while the A16 improved 16.3% and the A15 17.4%.
While you would expect a performance boost each year, the amount doesn't usually jump as much as the rumored figures propose. Apple's typical 10% jump is still considerable for its chips, but 20% would be a bit of a stretch.
Add in that this is a rumor based on an unverified Weibo post with no real proof or even a Geekbench screenshot to support it, and it becomes less believable as rumors go. Based on history, it's also too early for engineering validation test iPhone 15 Pro models to be available for testing in such a manner.
Furthermore, we weren't able to find any entries in the Geekbench database that matched these results.
That's not to say Apple may come out with an A17 that is extremely powerful for this generation. AppleInsider has discussed at length Apple's chip gains over the years, and a 20% single-core performance jump has happened in the past.
Amber Neely
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
25 Comments
Can’t wait for this. My 14 Pro takes a blink of an eye to open apps. Unacceptable.
“While the A17 is expected to be on the new 3nm process with speed and efficiency improvements, these numbers still seem unrealistic, at least when compared to scores of previous A-series generations.”
At least it's more believable than the 4000 single core score Max Tech ran with lol.
At the higher end of an improvement this couuuld be believable with 3nm offering a big improvement over a few generations of 5nm, but this is also that timeframe of a lot of fake benchmarks, even if one shows up in the GB database sometimes it's later taken down as a fake and I don't see this one on there even.