iPhone 16 Pro With A18 Chip Offers CPU Performance on Par With Apple's M1 Chipset

iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max were launched in global markets including India earlier this week, and the company's flagship smartphones are powered by the A18 Pro — its most powerful A-series chipset. On the popular benchmarking website Geekbench, the new processor is more powerful than the one on last year's iPhone 15 Pro Max, as well as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra — the handset at the top of the Android benchmark charts. The latest benchmark scores for the iPhone 16 Pro Max also suggest it may offer performance on par with Apple's desktop-class M1 chipset.

On Geekbench, listings for an iPhone 17,2 — corresponding to the top-of-the-line iPhone 16 Pro Max model — surfaced over the past couple of days. On one benchmark result posted on Wednesday, the iPhone 16 Pro Max scored 3,409 points on the single-core test and 8,492 on the multi-core test.

If these benchmarks are genuine — the iPhone 16 series goes on sale starting September 20, but reviewers already have access to the phone — Apple's flagship smartphone offers far better CPU performance than its predecessor. The iPhone 15 Pro Max (on average) scored 2,886 points and 7,157 points on average, in the single-core and multi-core tests on Geekbench, respectively.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is currently at the top of the list of Android smartphones benchmarked on Geekbench, with an (average) single core score of 2,145 points and a multi core score of 6,701 points. The South Korean tech conglomerate's flagship phone is equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, which currently offers the fastest performance on Android phones.

It's also worth noting that the multi-core benchmark score of the A18 Pro chip on the iPhone 16 Pro Max is slightly higher than the average score of the M1-powered MacBook Air that was launched in 2020. Apple's smartphone chip appears to offer similar performance as its desktop-class processor, which has two additional CPU cores.

It's worth noting that Apple's A18 Pro chip will soon have a more capable competitor — the purported Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is expected to be launched by Qualcomm next month. Alleged benchmarks of the new chipset were leaked by a tipster, suggesting the new chip scored 3,236 points and 10,049 points in the single-core and multi-core benchmark tests, respectively. However, it's worth taking these claims with a grain of salt as the processor is yet to be announced and performance could vary on smartphones that are launched with the chipset.