Benchmark

Geekbench: A11 Bionic smokes past Android rivals, beats iPad Pro, on par with 13″ MBP

Almost a year has passed following iPhone 7's debut and the Apple-designed A10 Fusion system-on-a-chip powering it has only recently been marginally outperformed by a few rival devices. However, Apple is already out with a game-changing A11 Bionic chip in the new iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, now ranked as by far the fastest mobile chip out there.

Benchmark GPU performance of your iPhone, iPad and Mac with Geekbench’s updated app

Available on App Store free of charge, Primate Labs' refreshed Geekbench app now lets you measure the performance of mobile GPUs in iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Mac devices. Geekbench 4.1 brings a new Compute Benchmark to iOS and macOS. Written using Apple's new graphics API, Metal, it measures the performance of the GPU at executing common compute tasks such as image processing and computational photography.

Alleged A10X Fusion benchmark suggests 20+ percent faster CPU in 2017 iPads

Apple typically takes the iPhone's A-series chips and updates them for iPads with more GPU cores and a faster performing, higher-clocked CPU. These chips typically have an “X” in their name, but with new iPad Pros and a fifth-generation iPad mini due in Spring 2017 the company has not yet officially announced an “X” variant of the iPhone 7's A10 Fusion chip.

Today, a source on Chinese social network Weibo posted alleged synthetic GeekBench 4 benchmark scores that could indicate at least one-fifth faster CPU performance in both single-core and dual-core computing for the purported A10X Fusion chip.

Galaxy Note 7 vs. iPhone 6s real-life speed test proves specs aren’t everything

In spite of running Qualcomm’s latest 64-bit Snapdragon 820 processor with four CPU cores, Adreno 530 graphics and 4GB of RAM, Samsung's latest Galaxy Note 7 phablet delivers embarrassing real-world performance when pitted against almost-a-year-older iPhone 6s and its in-house designed A9 chip with two CPU cores and just 2GB of RAM.

As seen in this side-by-side video comparison from YouTuber PhoneBuff, the iPhone 6s easily beats the latest Note when it comes to loading apps and games, thanks to the combination of efficient iOS software and Apple's custom-designed hardware.

Early CPU scores suggest modest gains for iPhone 7’s A10 chip vs. iPad Pro’s A9X

Early Geekbench 3 benchmark of the Apple-designed A10 system-on-a-chip—which will be the next iPhone and iPad's engine—was posted Thursday by Dutch blog TechTastic.nl. Purported scores suggest the device may not be much speedier than the iPhone 6s and iPad Pro. The upcoming chip scored a tad more than last year’s A9 powering the iPhone 6s series and a little bit faster than the A9X in the iPad Pro.

On the other hand, the benchmarked A10 is almost certainly a prototype unit so final scores should be higher than is currently the case.