Apple A17 Bionic makes stellar Geekbench debut with up to 47% performance gains over the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's didn't perform nearly as well as anticipated on Geekbench. While one can chalk that down to unoptimized software, a production device can only perform marginally better. Its competitor, the four Cortex-X4-toting Dimensity 9300, is yet to make an appearance on any benchmarking platform. On the other hand, Qualcomm's arch-rival, the Apple A17 Bionic, has supposedly shown up on Geekbench 6.
The information comes from Twitter user @Naveen_tech_wala and shows the iPhone 15 Pro in action. It scores 3,269 points in the single-core test and 7,666 in multi core. That is a remarkable leap over its predecessor, the A16 Bionic, which scored 2,531 and 6,460 points in the same tests. In essence, the Apple A17 Bionic offers 30% faster single-core performance and 18% multi core.
Using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (2,223/6,661) as a reference, the Apple A17 Bionic is a whopping 47% faster in single-core performance. The increased number of performance cores (1x Cortex-X4, 5X Cortex-A720) don't sum up to much either, as the Apple flagship still bests it by 15%. The Geekbench listing also states the A17 Bionic can boost up to 3.7 GHz, confirming an earlier leak that detailed its specifications.
Similarly, the Apple A17 Bionic scores 30,669 points in Geekbench's compute benchmark, 36% faster than its precursor did (~22,000 on average). This teeters on too-good-to-be-true territory, as there is no way one extra GPU core can account for such a massive performance increase. That said, one can attribute the stellar gains to the node shift between TSMC N4 and N3B.
As always, the above leak should be treated with some scepticism. The leaker in question is relatively unknown, and the lack of an actual Geekbench listing further muddies the waters. Furthermore, it was previously revealed that Apple had to scale down the A17 Bionic due to issues with TSMC's N3B node.