Apple A18 of iPhone 16 now scores close to Apple M1 in Geekbench multi-core test

Just after Apple announced the iPhone 16 lineup, the two new SoCs that power the devices within the series have popped up in Geekbench. The A18 that powers the non-Pro phones surfaced first, and this early run had a disappointing multi-core score.

However, as we noted in our coverage, these first scores aren't often inaccurate, as they could be from phones that are in a very early stage or are pre-production samples, and that held true. A new round of Geekbench listings has appeared, and on them, the iPhone 16 SoC performs as initially expected, better than the A17 Pro.

As a matter of fact, the new multi-core scores of Apple A18 in Geekbench are comparable to the Apple M1, the same processor powering the 2020 MacBook Air and 2021 iPad Pro (256 GB WiFi iPad Pro M4 curr. $899 on Amazon). In our benchmark, the latter got 8,622 points in multi-core. The iPhone 16 SoC in one of the new listings gets 8,370 points.

This also happens to be higher than the Apple A17 Pro, which got a max multi-core score of 7,224 in our test. With that, it becomes a little more apparent that the new iPhone 16 SoC isn't a rebadged A17 Pro, just like we speculated after seeing the details shared at the launch event.

But, again, these are also considered early scores as Apple hasn't yet started to ship the iPhone 16 line. So, it's possible that the user-tested scores after the smartphones start to ship can be different.