iPhone 7 could provide at least 33 percent faster CPU performance than iPhone 6s

iPhone 7 GeekBench CPU Scores leak 001

Alleged GeekBench CPU scores posted back in the summer suggested modest performance gains for the iPhone 7’s A10 chip versus the iPad Pro’s A9X processor, but were debunked as fake soon after.

Today, genuine-looking results of the GeekBench 4 synthetic benchmark of the iPhone 7’s CPU were posted on the website of PrimateLabs, the company that makes and sells the GeekBench suite.

According to the published data, the iPhone 7 could have its CPU performance boosted by at least one third, or about 33 percent, versus the iPhone 6s.

The tested device reported a single-core CPU score of 3,379 and 5,495 in multi-core tests (higher scores are better). By comparison, last year’s iPhone 6s did remarkably well in Geekbench tests, scoring 2,490 in single-core tests and 4,332 in multi-core tests.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 6s Plus shows a single-core score of 2,535 and 1,607 for the iPhone 6 Plus. In terms of multi-core performance, the iPhone 6s Plus shows a GeekBench score of 4,404 and 2,870 for the iPhone 6 Plus.

Assuming claimed iPhone 7 scores are genuine, the A10 chip powering Apple’s next handset could enable at least a 33 percent boost in single-core CPU performance, or about 25 percent faster multi-core CPU performance.

Based on the included information, the poster tested a 4.7-inch iPhone 7.

The device is identified by model number “iPhone9,3” and has two gigabytes of RAM (only the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Pro is said to have three gigabytes of RAM). The “iPhone9,3” designation suggests at least three different versions of iPhone 7 hardware, one of which could be the allegedly-abandoned iPhone 7 Pro model.

GeekBench identifies the device’s in-house designed A10 chip as having two CPU cores, 64 KB of L1 instruction cache, 64 KB of L1 data cache and 3MB of L2 cache.

The only sticking point: the reported CPU clock speed of just 396 MHz, likely due to GeekBench’s iOS app not having been updated with new hardware in mind.

For what it’s worth, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is adamant that the A10 chip in the iPhone 7 has its CPU clocked at up to 2.4GHz, a significant increase over the maximum CPU clock frequency of 1.85GHz for the A9 chip in the iPhone 6s/SE.

GeekBench doesn’t test GPUs so we’ll have to test the iPhone 7 ourselves when the device arrives to determine if Apple has sped up the A10’s graphics subsystem, too.

Curiously, the tested device reported iOS 10.1.

This isn’t surprising as Apple in the past few years has been developing “point” updates in parallel with major releases so it goes without saying that they’re already finishing up iOS 10.1, working on iOS 10.2 and thinking about iOS 10.3.

You can see GeekBench scores for other iOS devices here.

Source: PrimateLabs