Apple A16 Bionic flexes its multi-core muscles in newest Geekbench run

The Apple A16 Bionic's first Geekbench run was a bit of a disaster, especially in the multi-core test, where it performed worse than its predecessor, the A15 Bionic. While it still blows every Qualcomm/MediaTek/Exynos chipset out of the water, it cast doubt on Apple's lofty claims about its performance. Now, the SoC has redeemed itself with its second Geekbench appearance.

Twitter leaker ShrimpApplePro stumbled upon what appears to be the iPhone 14 Pro on the benchmarking platform. It nets a single-core score of 1,887 and a multi-core score of 5,455. The former figure is nothing out of the ordinary, but the latter is a marked improvement. It is also the first Apple A series chipset to breach the 5,000 points milestone on Geekbench's multi-core test, although the A15 Bionic has, on a few occasions, come within spitting distance.

The initial Apple A16 Bionic reveal came off as a bit suspicious due to it being compared with a nearly three-year-old A13. The handful of Geekbench runs we've seen indicate that it is little more than an incremental upgrade over the A15 Bionic, with the single-core gains sitting at around 5-7% and the multi-core gains at 10-12%. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.

Apple has consistently remained miles of the competition for nearly a decade, and it can afford to slack off for a generation to focus on power efficiency instead of raw performance. Perhaps the real gains will arrive with next year's A17 Bionic, which will supposedly be fabricated on TSMC's cutting-edge N3E node.

Buy the iPhone 13 Pro Max on Amazon