Tech

A17 Pro Chip Is Upping the Ante for Smartphone Chips Everywhere

  • Reading time: 2 min
A17 chip, apple, intel

Apple’s A17 Pro chip can go head-to-head with some of the top desktop CPUs available.

  • The A17 Pro achieved an impressive single-core score of 2,914, challenging Intel’s Core i9-13900K, which scored around 2,997.
  • While the A17 Pro’s multi-core score of 7,199 pales in comparison to the Core i9-13900K’s 20,947, its 6-core configuration remains impressive within the smartphone category.
  • The A17 Pro boasts a 10% boost in single-core performance compared to its predecessor, the A16 Bionic.

Apple does it again with the reveal of its new system-on-a-chip (SoC), A17 Pro chip. Turns out, Apple is powerful enough to go head-to-head with Intel.

Let’s start with the basics.

Geekbench 6 is a cross-platform benchmark that measures the performance of a device’s CPU. Basically, it runs a series of tests that ultimately measure a device’s ability to perform single-threaded tasks, like rendering a webpage and downloading a file, and multi-threaded tasks, like rendering a 3D scene and downloading multiple files at once.

A good Geekbench 6 score for a laptop is usually over 2,200 for single-core (single-threaded) and around 5,200 for multi-core (multi-threaded). For a smartphone, however, it’s over 1,700 for single-core and around 4,000 for multi-core.

Onto the fight. Shall we?

Apple’s A17 Pro chip is manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm technology. In single-core operations, it scored a remarkable 2,914 in Geekbench 6, a first for mobile SoCs. Bonus point? It did that while running at a clock speed of 3.75GHz. Intel’s Core i9-13900K, known for its exceptional single-threaded tasks, scored around 2,997 in Geekbench 6. Considering that the A17 Pro chip is designed for mobiles, who would have thought that it might make Intel clutch its pearls? I didn’t.

As far as multi-core performance is concerned, the A17 Pro scores a decent 7,199. You can’t really compare it to Intel’s Core i9-13900K’s 20,947, though. The former has a mere 6 cores while the latter is equipped to the teeth with 24 cores and 32 threads. Still impressive for a phone though.

In its own league, the A17 Pro chip is a significant improvement over the A16 Bionic, with a 10% increase in single-core performance. Specs-wise, its 3nm architecture makes it incredibly efficient, reducing power consumption and extending battery life. We all know the struggle of keeping an iPhone alive till the end of the day.

Is it winning any championships against desktop CPUs? No, but it is encroaching on their territory. Among smartphones, it might take the crown and make the others eat dust.

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