Apple’s latest offerings – the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus – are equipped with a six-core A11 bionic chip which the company says has brought some major improvements from the previous iPhone 7.
Featuring two performance cores and four efficiency cores, early scores from Geekbench suggest that both devices not only significantly outpeform the A10 perform but also beat the A10X Fusion found in the iPad Pro, making it perform to the standard of the latest 13-inch Macbook Pro.
12 Geekbench scans for the A11 chip demonstrated an average single-score of 4169 and an average multi-score of 9836 with some individual scores reaching even higher at 4274 and 10438 respectively.
A single A11 score:
The 10.5 inch iPad Pro with an A10 chip has an average single-core score of 3887 and a multi-core score of 9210. The high-end dual core 3.6GHz 13-inch MacBook Pro (2017) has a single-core score of 4592 and a multi-core score of 9602 which clearly suggests that the A11 chip outperforms on multi-core and comes very close on single-core. Performance is even better when compared with the lower-end 2017 MacBook Pro models.
Average score for 10.5 inch iPad Pro with A10X Fusion:
This means that on paper the iPhone X and iPhone 8 will perform much better than their predecessors. According to Apple, the performance cores in the A11 chip are 25 per cent faster than the A10 chip while efficiency cores are 70 per cent faster. The A11 chip is better at multi-tasks because the second-generation performance controller is able to harness six cores simultaneously.
Of course, although these scores are impressive, how they will perform in the real world remains to be seen. According to analyst Dan Matte, IPC (instructions per cycle) movements are “relatively modest” and encourages users to ignore the Geekbench scores:
If you subtract out the efficiency gains from removing 32-bit support, you’re left with maybe very roughly a 15% improvement in CPU IPC for the big cores, assuming equivalent clocks to the A10. Apple could have pushed performance and efficiency further, if not for 10FF being really bad. The era of the hyper Moore’s Law curve in mobile is officially over, in my opinion, though maybe the A10 already signaled that. It’s all rough sledding from here on out, based on the state of foundry challenges.
Improvements will be made clearer next week when the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are released.
