It’s one thing to surpass a predecessor or competitor, but quite another when a new mobile processor outperforms a high-powered desktop solution. As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, the new iPhone 17 processor is a beast hiding in an unassuming cell chassis. The A19 Pro is not sheepish by any means, and despite having the same number of cores as its predecessor, a slight bump in clock speed is all that was needed for it to stride past in style.
| A19 Pro | A18 Pro | Snapdragon 8 Elite | Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 | Ryzen 9 9950X | Core i9-14900KS | |
| General specifications | 2P+4E, up to 4.26 GHz | 2P+4E, up to 4.0 GHz | 2P+6E, up to 4.47 GHz | 5P+3E, up to 3.01 GHz | 16P/32T, 4.30 GHz – 5.75 GHz | 8P+16E/32T, 3.20 GHz – 6.0 GHz |
| Single-Thread | 3895 | 3505 | 2862 | 1959 | 3482 | 3362 |
| Multi-Thread | 9746 | 8658 | 9481 | 4989 | 23584 | 23445 |
Single-Threaded Benchmark Percentage Breakdown
- 11% faster than Apple A18 Pro
- 36% faster than Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite
- 11.8% faster than AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
- 15.8% faster than Intel Core i9-14900KS
When it comes to multi-threaded scores, the A19 still shows significant gains over the A18 Pro but only has a slight lead over the Snapdragon 8 Elite. As expected, it also still falls drastically short of the aforementioned AMD and Intel processors, which have far more cores, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Multi-Threaded Benchmark Percentage Breakdown
- 12.5% faster than Apple A18 Pro
- 2.7% faster than Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite
- 41.9% slower than AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
- 40.5% slower than Intel Core i9-14900KS
No matter how you look at it, the A19 Pro is a step in the right direction, and it demonstrates a consistent effort among processor manufacturers to advance their mobile offerings. Apple’s transition to its own ARM-based silicon continues to move forward and will no doubt be something that NVIDIA keeps an eye on as it prepares the rumored N1X for release. The NVIDIA N1X is being co-developed with MediaTek as an ARM-based processor designed for mobile and desktop use, and with up to 20 cores, it is also looking a bit beastly.
Discussion (9 replies)
Join Discussion →I will agree this is a big step for mobile compute. I wonder though how the testing was done.
Just looking at how bad it performed in multi-threaded applications it has zero chance of making any headway in the desktop market. And only 2.7% faster than the snapdragon.
Most everything application wise is moving away from being single threaded.
Meh, with these chips its always oh look! we beat the Nvidia 6090ti gold super that yet to launch in.... This super specific task that we dedicated a bunch of the die for! WE ARE HEROES!
That said these chips are quite great, same qualcomms etc, what is needed is deeper proliferation, lower very agressive princing for not just laptops, but loaded mini pcs and such.
The performance assessment by Tom’s Hardware and others was done with Geekbench 6.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK it measures performance which the device is able to sustain for a couple of minutes. Steady-state performance is not tested.
(I have never used Geekbench myself, and I can't find actual figures of the durations of the subtests right away.)
It's a phone/tablet cpu going against desktop processors. Its neat but little impact to.my day to day.
I mean, if this is true:
Single-Threaded Benchmark Percentage Breakdown
Then wasn't the old A18Pro chip ~also~ faster than the 9950X and the 14900k?
Sure, they are cherry picking things here. But one fits in the palm of your hand while running the screen and everything, while some of the others need... 1000W power supplies. The tradeoff is, as others have pointed out - sustained performance and the presence of large numbers of core units (multithreading)
I've always been a fan of Apple silicon, and my old M1 Macbook Pro is still chugging along very capably, although the battery only lasts me about 3 days now instead of all week.
If this was about the M series cpu... ok i am interested in an apple pc. But I am stuck solid in the windows world. As software becomes more hardware agnostic it gets more and more attractive.
Yeah, there isn't much point in the whole Mac vs Windows thing - hardware has become a lot more agnostic. And while both camps have went in different directions, neither has went in a particularly good one.
But still there's an awful lot of things that are still Windows only - I get it. I use my Macbook as my daily, but I do have my WIndows PC for gaming, and a shitty Lenovo laptop I can drag to sites for when I need to run specific software that's windows only.
As nice as the ARMs have been, most of the benefit there was just in battery life and weight/cooling. It was nice when Mac was Intel - could do almost everything via Virtualization and didn't need multiple machines for work. Still had a gaming PC though.
Most computing is becoming client/ front end+ cloud for a fee. Im embracing it to an extent tbh.