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iPhone 17 chip becomes the fastest single-core CPU in the world on PassMark
- nobankai 1y ago[dead]
- MBCook 1y agoI can’t wait to see the numbers from the next M-series chip that integrates these core designs. I don’t know if that will be the M5 or M6 series but with active cooling and wall/big battery power I bet it will be impressive. And a pro/ultra variant with lots of cores might post some very nice multi core numbers. Way to go Apple. That’s a great accomplishment.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoThis bodes well for the rumored entry level MacBook with an A-series chip inside. If they can get the price on those down to $500-$600 it’ll run circles around everything else at the price point.
- wmf 1y agoYeah, several people noticed that the A19 has similar performance to the M2 which is still a great CPU.
- kube-system 1y agoThe M2 scores 3894 on single core. At 5149, this should be noticeably (~30%) faster in single threaded applications.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoIt will probably have no fan and throttle under real work like the m series air.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoNot really a problem with how those usually only throttle with sustained load. Very few people do anything that keeps the CPU tied up for longer than a minute or two.
- gpm 1y agoAnd even then, my M1 air is still fast under sustained load. As fast as it would be with a fan? Surely not. But fast enough that unless I'm racing compilers or something I really don't care. It helps that for heavier work I tend to use my desktop I guess.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoYeah these things have margin for days, so they’re still reasonably snappy even when throttled. It’s not like you’re cut back to Intel Atom performance levels or something.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoEhh. A lot of people play games. I can make the fans spin heavy on my m3 pro. Especially when most games on mac today mean running through a translation layer and weren't multithreaded to begin with. Throttling is a nonstarter for games. Might be ok for compiling but for gaming the lag induced by throttling makes it entirely unplayable.
- commandersaki 1y agoWere you anticipating people playing (probably AAA) games on a budget Macbook?
- kjkjadksj 1y agoThese aren’t modern AAA games that spool fans. Well they were 10 years ago when they came out I guess.
- 1y ago
- mcintyre1994 1y agoSurely the cost to Apple of A-series vs M-series isn't that significant though? I'd think they'd need to cut a lot (or their margin) to get down to that price point on a laptop.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoOne big difference is volume. They sell way, way more A-series devices than M-series devices and so they may benefit from economy of scale. With all of Apple's service offerings these days, they could also potentially justify slim margins by positioning the A-series MacBook as both a loss leader and gateway drug.
- wilsonnb3 1y agoMac mini at 600, MacBook Air at 1000 Apple TV 4K at 200, MacBook at 600 Back of the napkin math but it checks out.
- GeekyBear 1y agoThe M1 Air at Wal-Mart has gone on sale for as low as $599 already. The M4 Air goes on sale for $799 pretty regularly. I would expect to see them use the same sort of game plan for an A series MacBook that they used with the iPhone SE. Use previous gen parts for items like the screen and body (for cost savings) along with current gen SOCs.
- paxys 1y agoThe future is going to be a single line of chips that goes into iPhone, iPad and Mac. Pricing doesn't have much to do with it. If Apple wanted to sell a $500 MacBook they would have done it already. The processor isn't what is standing in the way.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoThey could technically do it today but I imagine they want differentiation so that the cheap MacBook doesn't cannibalize sales of the Air and Pro too heavily.
- mmcnl 1y agoWhat do you mean "future"? This is already the case. M-series chips share the same architecture with A-series CPUs. If you increase the A19 core count you'll end up with something close to M5.
- commandersaki 1y agoIt would be nice to have these CPUs benchmarked like for like using the same OS as the M-series. Unsure if that changes anything.
- layer8 1y agoIf only it were open to other operating systems.
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoWouldn't it be so cool if you could actually do anything with it? Imagine building a Bugatti and installing an unremovable speed limiter that forced you to top out at 75 MPH, because of course you're never going to take it to a track. It was only intended for highway travel at best. But hey, you can scroll at 120hz now, right? Think different! All this tells me is that Intel and AMD are the only manufacturers making leading chips that you can do anything with. Edit: Fixed last sentence.
- bogwog 1y agoI agree with what you said but... > Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips lol wat
- tredre3 1y ago> All this tells me is that Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips that you can do anything with. From context you seem to be talking about overclocking. In which case only a handful of Intel chips are unlocked per generation. By contrast, most of AMD chips are unlocked.
- patchymcnoodles 1y agoAs another commenter said, the part with Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips, doesn't really makes sense. Right now Intel is losing a lot, lucky to them Nvidia invested. So far I would only use AMD. In my desktop is an AMD, because it is just the fastest desktop CPU und the threadrippers are absolute multicore beasts for servers.
- freedomben 1y agoI've been super impressed with AMD chips as well. I have actually had to try to find CPU bound use cases because the damn thing is so fast it makes you question if it actually worked
- rudimentary_phy 1y agoI'm not sure about the Intel thing, but I agree that it would be nice to be able to use it the way you want. You're talking about a company that limits you from having a comma on the front of the iPhone keyboard. Why?
- DSingularity 1y agoWhy is the pro scoring less?
- layer8 1y ago“Both the A19 and A19 Pro benchmarked within the margin of error of each other”
- 12_throw_away 1y agoBecause error bars and p-values don't make for exciting headlines with well-defined "rankings"
- pcurve 1y agoA19 = 5177 A19 Pro = 5123 A18 Pro = 4130 A18 chip = 3928 A17 Pro = 4528 A16 = 4011 Not sure why the A18 passmark scores are quite a bit lower than A17
- Veliladon 1y agoBecause the A18 had its L2 and LLC caches slashed in half. Frequency and uarch improvements don’t matter if you can’t keep the ports fed.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago[flagged]
- charcircuit 1y agoWhat's wrong with running iOS apps with it?
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- lomase 1y agoYou can't play 99.99% of games ever made for example.
- musicale 1y ago> You can't play 99.99% of games ever made for example. I expect it's the other way around with mobile being a larger platform than PC or console. How many games are available in the iOS app store vs. Steam?
- tavavex 1y agoDoes income or number of apps matter for anything here? Like, if given the choice, would you rather only play games from App Store or only games from Steam? The point they're making is obvious. iOS was and still is a platform for mobile applications and mobile games. Despite how much processing power is crammed into those devices, you can't use similarly for "serious work". All that power will never be used to run actual games (like games from a PC or a console), or render a 3D model in Blender, or do CAD work, or run "full" versions of any software that has a cut-down mobile variant. Which begs the question - why mimic the power of a full computer while having no way of doing the work that full computers need all that power for?
- musicale 1y ago
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoIt’s a really a shame to put such a good cpu in such an artificially limited phone. Apple already has all the elements required for effective convergence but would rather have us lug gimped devices out of greed. The current situation is so sad for actual innovation. I don’t want a MacBook with an A19, I want to use the A19 I already have connected to a screen and a keyboard with a proper software stack.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jasonwatkinspdx 1y agoThe vast majority of the market is totally uninterested in docking their phone like that though. So Apple et all are making a reasonable choice.
- bigyabai 1y ago> So Apple et all are making a reasonable choice. Interesting how people rationalize this stuff. My phone can dock to a screen; I've never used the feature, but it doesn't obstruct anything I do. It's a nice-to-have, and it would be kinda appealing if Firefox and Spotify both work like normal. I might even deign to say I could get work done on it (though I've never tried). Presumably the real reason is that Apple is still afraid to segment their market. A plug-in iPhone would stop people from buying the AppleTV or Mac Mini for home theater applications.
- GeekyBear 1y agoChrome on Android doesn't allow you to use plugins like uBlock Origin. People manage to rationalize that decision, which makes the web largely unusable for users in the name of protecting Google's bottom line. Thankfully, there are other options.
- lysace 1y agoWe need modern open source CPU benchmarks. PassMark and Geekbench are closed source. I don't know why I should trust them to e.g. treat fundamentally different kinds of devices in a sane and fair way. They have vastly different cooling mechanisms, for one. It matters if they can sustain a certain load for 5 minutes or for 5 hours.
- Etheryte 1y agoIn some other context I'd be inclined to agree, but I swear the moment there's an open benchmark, it's going to get gamed by someone. So long as there's money to be made, the incentives don't align, look at Volkswagen for some inspiration.
- zamadatix 1y agoIf you have a specific use case in mind you might as well just test that use case directly. E.g. PTS (Phoronix Test Suite) is not a traditional benchmark, it's a workload tester, and it's right up that alley (though you then run into the problem of "the workload I care to compare doesn't run on an iPhone at all", at which point you either compare generalities again or don't care anymore).
- lysace 1y agoI suppose what I really mean is for the industry to agree on some benchmark or two. Like the 80s PC mag benchmarks. It obviously doesn't scale well if every potential end user has to benchmark every device.
- 1y ago
- Waraqa 1y agoThis is great news for the entire ARM ecosystem. The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit.
- freedomben 1y ago> The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit. Haven't they been playing leap frog for years now? I avoid the ARM ecosystem now because of how non-standardized BIOS is (especially after being burned with several different SoC purchases), and I prefer compatibility over performance, but I think there have been some high performance ARM chips for quite some time
- mattbillenstein 1y agoI came to realize by soldering a lot of fast ram on to the board of newer laptops and phones, maybe it's not the instruction set that matters that much. Modern Apple hardware has so much more memory bandwidth than the x86 systems they're being compared to - I'm not sure it's apples to apples.
- lordnacho 1y agoI talked to a guy who'd worked at Apple on the chips. He more or less said the same thing, it's the memory that's all the difference. This makes a lot of sense. If the calculations are fast, they need to be fed quickly. You don't want to spend a bunch of time shuffling various caches.
- zamadatix 1y agoMemory bandwidth/latency is helpful in certain scenarios, but it can be easily oversold in the performance portion of the story. E.g. the 9950X and 9950X3D are within less than 1/20th of a percentage point of each other in PassMark Single thread (feeding a single core is dead easy) but have a spread of ~6.4% (in favor of the 9950X3D) in the multi-thread (where the cache is starting to help on the one CCD). It could just as easily have been in the other direction or 10 times as much depending on what the benchmark was trying to do. For most day to day user workloads the performance difference from memory bandwidth/latency is the "nil to some" though. Meanwhile the AI Max+ 395 has at least twice the bandwidth + same number of cores and comes to more like a ~15% loss on single and ~30% loss on multithread due to other "traditional" reasons for performance difference. I still like my 395 though, but more for the following reason. The more practical advantage of soldered memory on mobile devices is the power/heat reductions, same with increasing the cache on e-cores to get something out of every possible cycle you power rather than try to increase the overall computation with more wattage (i.e. transistors or clocks). Better bandwidth/latency is a cool bonus though. For a hard number the iPhone 17 Pro Max is supposed to be around 76 GB/s, yet my iPhone 17 Pro Max has a higher PassMark single core performance score than my 9800X3D with larger L3 cache and RAM operating at >100 GB/s. The iPhone does have a TSMC node advantage to consider as well, but I still think it just comes out ahead due to "better overall engineering".
- mensetmanusman 1y agoMicrosoft outlook and PowerPoint will still take 15 seconds to open your document.
- pizlonator 1y agoThis is cool but it’s just one benchmark. It’s not clear to me what exactly PassMark even measures. That doesn’t mean the result is “wrong” but take it with a grain of salt
- osti 1y agoApple chips are fastest in single core in most benchmarks, not just passmark.
- nicce 1y agoImagine if they would just sell those CPUs for other use cases. Put 2x price tag if they fear losing other hardware sales.
- commandersaki 1y agoQualcomm & Samsung kind of fill the market for high end mobile CPU though. I don't know what Apple brings to the table if their CPUs are used outside of their designs.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago> I don't know what Apple brings to the table if their CPUs are used outside of their designs. Sounds like Apple brings the fastest single-core CPU in the world, so if you're looking for that, it would have been nice.
- commandersaki 1y agoFair, to entertain the thought though, it'd make little sense if it was COTS due to either a loss or razor thin margins due to low demand. However nobody is stopping a hardware integrator approaching Apple to use it, but it'd probably be stupid expensive and shrouded in secrecy as Apple would not want to cede full control of its deployment due to things like Secure Enclave.
- zamadatix 1y agoI think it's less about what hardware integrators want more what Apple doesn't want. Apple tries to be as soup to nuts about their solution as possible, they don't want to piece that out to give some of the margin of the best pieces to a 3rd party trying to compete with them instead. Anything they could pay is just from revenue Apple could already target directly and keep all of to themselves.
- commandersaki 1y ago
- Aurornis 1y agoPassMark single threaded test is a very simple synthetic benchmark according to their docs: > The single threaded test is an aggregate of the floating point, string sorting and data compression tests. It’s an impressive score, but there’s more to performance in real apps than these three simple tests. This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip and the great job they did keeping it fed, but PassMark single threaded is about the simplest measurement you can do. Modern CPUs aren’t really optimized for peak floating point throughput because any GPU will do a much better job at that. It’s also not clear if they actually use SIMD features of the chips, where desktop and server class parts should be able to walk away from the Apple phone chip due to their higher power limit alone.
- GeekyBear 1y ago> This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip Apple's in house silicon strategy has long been to create wide cores that perform more instructions per clock cycle and then run the cores at a conservative clock speed for power savings. Running up the clock speed for performance no matter what effect that has on power consumption and heat has been what we've seen from Qualcomm/Intel/AMD/Nvidia. In Geekbench multicore: > the A19 Pro delivered a powerful multi-core score of 11,054... while using a remarkably low 12.1W of power... To put that into perspective, other flagship chips from the Android camp had to push their power consumption much higher to even come close to its scores. The Snapdragon 8 Elite, for instance, had to use 17W of power to complete the same benchmark. Meanwhile, the Dimensity 9400 consumed a staggering 18.4W. https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/09/apple-a19-pro-chip-up-to-34-percent-more-efficient-than-rivals-iphone-17-pro.html https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/09/apple-a19-pro-chip-...
- evanjrowley 1y agoAnother reason why Apple should allow the UTM project to use the JIT API in their iOS app. I want to virtualize ARM64 Linux VMs on the fastest CPU in the world. Apple could put Android's Termux to shame, but they don't want to do that, and therefore I have no use for them. What great things are iPhone users going to do with a fast locked down phone? Play Roblox at 120 FPS? Doom scroll at 2x speed? Not know how to use their phone (but faster)?
- Jotalea 1y agohttps://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/