Apple’s new A19 Pro chip for the iPhone 17 was introduced yesterday and the primary Geekbench scores have been uploaded. To be fairly frank, if this was a brand new x86 CPU for gaming PCs, we might be shedding our minds.
The A19 Pro is scoring practically 4,000 factors in Geekbench 6’s single-thread check. That compares with about 3,500 for the best AMD desktop CPU. And could I remind you, that is in a freaking telephone. The A19 Pro in a desktop with the ability price range and thermals that affords can be greater nonetheless, nicely over 4,000.
If a brand new AMD or Intel CPU popped up in Geekbench hitting, say, 4,500, the web would nearly break. And to be clear, these Geekbench numbers for the A19 Pro are believable. The previous-gen A18 Pro scores round 3,500 factors in Geekbench 6. So, a 15% enhance to 4,000 factors for the most recent chip fitted to a telephone with a brand new vapor chamber cooling system does not look like a large stretch.
Of course, Geekbench is hardly the proper benchmark. And it is demonstrably not a sport. But comparative real-world efficiency in functions does not are typically one million miles away from Geekbench. The backside line right here is that Apple has lengthy had a transparent IPC or single-core and per-clock-cycle efficiency benefit over x86 chips from AMD and Intel, and it seems like the brand new A19 Pro chip will keep that lead.
Really roughly, it seems just like the A19 Pro has an IPC benefit approaching 30% over the perfect x86 chips. That’s fairly large. It’s additionally a determine that AMD and Intel are most unlikely to succeed in in a single era. So, it is unlikely that AMD’s next-gen Zen 6 architecture or Intel’s Nova Lake will match the Apple A19 Pro.
But here’s the really crazy bit. Even if they did, that probably wouldn’t mean they’d match Apple. Because the A19 Pro will be in iPhones you can buy in a few weeks, but Zen 6 and Nova Lake aren’t out for a year or more. And by then, there will be another new Apple CPU and that one is expected to be on TSMC’s new N2 silicon and will almost certainly be a fair bit faster than the A19 Pro which is on TSMC N3 silicon.
However you slice it, then, Apple looks to have a pretty major architectural advantage with its CPU cores. That’s a bit odd when you consider that it’s not ostensibly a CPU company. And so it begs the question of why the CPU specialists at AMD and Intel can’t match Apple.
Part of the answer is perhaps that Apple has full control of its own hardware and software stack. It designs and engineers both its own CPUs and operating systems and can optimise them to work nicely together to the nth degree.
It also, obviously, has absolutely huge resources and uses the very latest TSMC silicon. By way of example, those Geekbench 6 results show the Apple A19 Pro with 6MB L2 cache per performance core. That’s 50% more than Geekbench reports for the previous A18 Pro.
The comparison gets a bit complicated because the A18 Pro actually has 8 MB of L2 cache per performance core. But here’s the thing. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D has just 1MB L2 cache per core. The full cache comparison is complicated and currently unclear, what with the X3D’s V-cache and Apple’s own last level SoC cache, which was 24MB for the A18 Pro. But it certainly seems like Apple absolutely loads its chips with cache and can probably do so because it uses the most advanced silicon.
Undoubtedly, there’s a lot more going on than just Apple throwing a load of cache memory at its processor cores. But however Apple is achieving this performance, it’s very impressive. And I kinda wish we had access to it in our PCs.
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