Apple announced their new generation iPhones yesterday, the normal looking iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and the striking iPhone X. They have new hardware aboard and one of the changes we come to expect is the new processors that are shipped with the new iPhones.
The new iPhones will be shipping with the Apple A11 Bionic processor, which is the latest and greatest processor Apple has designed for their iOS devices. The A11’s CPU features a 6 core design, which includes 2 performance cores which are 25% faster and 4 efficiency cores that are 70% faster than the previous design. The GPU is also 30% faster than the A10 Fusion chip that powered the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
When it comes to performance, the A10 Fusion chip on the iPhone 7 was among the top performance when you consider Geekbench 4 CPU test. Geekbench 4 is a multiplatform test that allows us to compare CPU performance between mobile chips and PC chips. The A10 Fusion chip in particular, has a single core performance of around 3500 which was a record for smartphone processors and 5900 for the multicore performance.
Now with the A11 Bionic processors inside the new iPhones, Apple has taken that performance to a whole new level as shown by this screenshot.
Looking at iPhone 8/X benchmarks. Android / Qualcomm left so far back in the dust now it's irrelevant. RIP Intel pic.twitter.com/mlVlGOXhlS
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) September 12, 2017
The Apple A11 chip has astounding performance as shown from this screenshot. The single core performance is over 4000 and the multicore performance is almost 10,000, which is insane considering the fact that it is a chip designed for smartphones and not for laptops.
It is even more impressive if you consider the fact that Geekbench 4 performance is based on a baseline score of 4000 which was obtained from an Intel Core i7 6600 U, a processor we see on laptops. This performance is similar to a quad core Core i5 7300 HQ which should worry Intel since now we have a smartphone chip that is performing as well as a laptop CPU.
Apple currently is way ahead of the competition in the smartphone CPU performance and the current top dogs in the Android space (Snapdragon 835, Exynos 8895 and Kirin 960) still lag behind the new iPhones in both single core and multicore performance as shown from the Geekbench 4 tests.
Smartphone processor manufacturers like Samsung (Exynos), Huawei (Kirin) and Qualcomm (Snapdragon) have their work cut out to play catch up with Apple and Intel has to make sure their laptop chips continue breaking new performance grounds since now Apple is becoming a threat to them.
