The first A17 Pro benchmarks don't tell us how much better the iPhone 15 Pro will be

Share the Tech Knowledge!

2023-09-14 12:39:45
www.macworld.com

The new iPhone 15 Pro has an A17 Pro processor, the latest in Apple’s A-series for its iPhones. During its Wonderlust event, Apple said the A17 Pro offers “a huge advancement in performance.” Just how huge? Well, we now know part of the answer.

Geekbench, a popular benchmark tool, allows users to submit scores to an online database, and it looks like scores have been submitted for the iPhone 15 Pro. Tested with iOS 17, the A17 Pro in an iPhone identified as “iPhone 16,1” (which is likely the iPhone 15 Pro) posted a single-core score of 2914, which is a 16 percent increase over the 2520 score of the A16 Bionic in the iPhone 14 Pro. The A17 Pro’s multi-core score of 7238 is 13 percent faster than the A16 Bionic’s score of 6387. Apple claims a 10 percent faster CPU, but it does not mention how that improvement was measured.

Apple emphasized that the big performance improvements are with GPU performance, boasting a 20 percent increase over the A16 Bionic, as well as four times the performance with ray tracing. Geekbench’s Compute benchmark gauges graphic performance, but its Compute database does not have any iPhone 15 Pro results. So we’ll need to wait for more scores to see exactly how much better the A17 Pro is over the A16 Bionic.

The A17 Pro is Apple’s first chip created with the 3nm process, which allows for a greater transistor density than with previous chips. The A17 Pro features a 6-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores. Apple redesigned the 6-core GPU to support ray tracing acceleration, and its MetalFX Upscaling works with the 16-core Neural Engine, which Apple says is two times faster.

Our iPhone 15 superguide has more information on Apple’s new iPhone. If you’re ready to spend your money, here’s how to pre-order the iPhone 15.