As we all know, Apple announced its new flagship iPhone model, the iPhone X, at the Apple Event on Tuesday. The device is outfitted with an A11 Bionic chip that has two performance cores (for intensive tasks) and four efficiency cores (for low-power tasks). Of course, the A11 definitely outdoes the old A10 chip in the iPhone 7, but that isn't the only device that it's better than: Geekbench scores show that the iPhone X processor is more powerful than the that of the 10.5" iPad Pro as well as some MacBooks. In fact, it seems that the iPhone X is the highest performance smartphone available, with a single-core score of 4169, and an average multi-core score of 9836. As MacRumors mentioned, though, some individual scores were way higher than that, "with single-core scores topping out at 4274 and multi-core scores at 10438." The publication goes on to say:
Comparatively, the 10.5-inch iPad Pro with A10 Fusion chip has an average Geekbench single-core score of 3887 and a multi-core score of 9210. Apple's highest-end dual-core 3.5GHz 13-inch 2017 MacBook Pro has a single-core score of 4592 and a multi-core score of 9602, suggesting the A11 outperforms it on multi-core tasks and comes close on single-core tasks.
However, analyst Dan Matte said in a blog post that he advises everyone to "completely ignore geekbench," calling the improvements "relatively modest":
If you subtract out the efficiency gains from removing 32-bit support, you're left with maybe very roughly a 15% improvement in CPU IPC for the big cores, assuming equivalent clocks to the A10. Apple could have pushed performance and efficiency further, if not for 10FF being really bad. The era of the hyper Moore's Law curve in mobile is officially over, in my opinion, though maybe the A10 already signaled that. It's all rough sledding from here on out, based on the state of foundry challenges.
Thoughts? Questions?
What do you think about the iPhone X geekbench scores? Let us know in the comments!
