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.
The site received only single-core CPU scores. Benchmark results for dual-core CPU tests, as well as GPU scores, were not provided.
The alleged benchmark shows the A10 achieving a CPU score of 3,010.
By comparison, the previous-generation A9/A9X chips respectively scored 2,519/3,000 in single-core tests. In other words, the A10 squeezed only 491 points more than the iPhone 6s’s A9—a performance increase of about eighteen percent—and just ten points more than the iPad Pro’s A9X processor.
Final scores should be available by the time first A10-equipped iPhones and iPads start hitting and if history is anything to go by, the speed difference between the A10 and A9/A9X should become more pronounced.
That’s because early benchmarks of the A8 and A9 chips showed an identical performance increase of about eighteen percent but the final difference between them was 43 percent—a sizable improvement in performance.
Historically, each A-series processor was twice as fast as its predecessor. The iPhone 5’s A6 was more than 2x faster than the A5 chip in the iPhone 4s.
The A7 inside the iPhone 5s and iPad Air—the world’s first 64-bit mobile chip—was more than twice as fast as the A6 and the A8 in the iPhone 6 delivered percent faster CPU and eighty percent faster GPU performance versus the A7.
The iPad Pro’s A9X chip packs in even faster performance in terms of graphics, putting it roughly on par with Intel’s 2013 Core i5 in Geekbench’s GPU benchmarks.
Source: TechTastic.nl