Early A14 Geekbench scores suggest iPhone 12 could match the iPad Pro’s performance

Claimed Geekbench scores, spotted Monday, for a yet-to-be-announced Apple A14 system-on-a-chip that will power so-called iPhone 12 show massive jumps in multi-core performance and speed, indicating the next iPhone might match performance of the current iPad Pro.

If these staggering single and multi-threaded Geekbench scores are anything to go by, then the A14 Bionic should prove itself an impressive piece of mobile engineering. The claimed Geekbench entry for the unreleased Apple A14 shows a clock frequency of 3.0GHz.

These are the Claimed Geekbench scores for Apple A14:

  • Single-core: 1,658
  • Multi-core: 4,612

By comparison, here are the Geekbench scores for the Apple A12X chip in the iPad Pro:

  • Single-core: 1,110
  • Multi-core: 4,568

While synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench only measure a chip’s raw CPU and GPU performance, they rarely paint an accurate picture of what the user might expect in terms of real-life performance. That said, these scores are certainly indicative of relative improvements.

WccfTech notes:

According to previous results, this chipset is powerful enough to be on par with an Intel 6-core processor, so a huge jump shown by the A14 shows it will be faster than a notebook CPU.

For context, the third-generation iPad Pro is a year and a half old, and uses an enhanced version of Apple’s previous-generation processor, dubbed the A12X Bionic, which features improved graphics performance and additional (eight) cores versus its regular A12 Bionic counterpart that powers the iPhone XS series.

Although Apple has in the meantime released another silicon generation in form of the A13 Bionic chip powering the latest iPhone 11 series, the iPad Pro’s A12X Bionic is Apple’s fastest mobile chip to date — it outperforms even Core i7-powered laptops.

Apple claims that its slim slate is more powerful than 92 percent of PC notebooks in the wild.

Apple was likely able to achieve such a respectable jump in chip performance through a combination of TSMC’s cutting-edge five-nanometre process technology (the current A13 chips are being built on TSMC’s seven-nanometer process) and an increase in the chip’s clock speed — at nearly 3.1GHz, the A14 has the highest clock frequency of any Apple mobile chip to date.

The question is, what does Apple plan on doing with all this added oomph?

Outside of the usual camera and augmented reality improvements, as well as cutting-edge gaming, the Apple A14 looks to be the prime candidate for Apple’s rumored notebook that should be powered by its in-house ARM-based CPU technology rather than Intel.

The new Apple A14 chip should power all the upcoming iPhone models that Apple plans to release this year, as well as next-generation iPad Pros.