iPhone 14 Pro Max with A16 chipset appears on Geekbench with minimal performance improvement

Only the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max are getting the new Apple A16 chipset, the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus are getting last year’s A15 instead. How much are they missing out? The phones are coming out on September 16 (except the Plus, which will be out in October), so we can’t fully answer that question yet. But a Geekbench score gives us a preview of the answer.

The “iPhone15,3”, better known as the iPhone 14 Pro Max, posted a single-core score of 1,879 and a multi-core score of 4,664. The iPhone 13 Pro Max typically gets 1,725 and 4,848, respectively.

Geekbench results: iPhone 14 Pro Max • iPhone 13 Pro Max

That is +9% single-core and actually a small decrease in the multi-core test. And this is with an increase of peak clock speed of the performance cores from 3.23GHz to 3.46GHz.

Of course, we’re looking at only a single result from the Apple A16 chip, so it’s too early to draw conclusions. Still, if this result is in any way representative, the new chip doesn’t sound all that impressive.

That being said, the reality might not be far off. During the presentation Apple showed this chart comparing the new A16 to 2019’s A13 chipset, saying that CPU performance is up 33.3%. That’s over the course of three years, so those 9% compared to last year look believable.

Performance isn’t everything, Apple claims that the 33.3% performance increase also comes with a 20% reduction in power. This also comes with node upgrades – 4nm for A16, 5nm for A15 and 7nm+ for the A13.

Also worth noting is that Geekbench doesn’t test the GPU and the A16 should bring an improvement on that front too. Also, the A15 chip used in the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus is the 5-core GPU version that was used in the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max (the 13 and 13 mini used a 4-core version).

One final note, the iPhone 14 Pro Max still has 6GB of RAM (same as the 13 Pro Max).

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