New iPhone crushes all Android competition. The Apple A20 Pro chip offers top-tier single-core performance

Shortly after the introduction of the iPhone 18 Pro and the Duo foldable, the first benchmark of their shared heart appeared. The Apple A20 Pro chip ran the Geekbench 6.7 test, and the numbers are such that Android competition will have a lot of catching up to do — however, Apple unexpectedly loses in one discipline.

Clock Speed Isn’t Everything

The tested unit, identified as iPhone19,3 (most likely the iPhone 18 Pro Max), scored 4,725 points in the single-core and 12,575 in the multi-core test. Geekbench recognized a six-core processor in a two-plus-four configuration, with the performance cores reaching up to 4.93 GHz. The device has 12 GB of RAM.

The comparison with Qualcomm is a textbook example of why it’s not worth judging chips by frequency. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 reached up to 5.01 GHz in an early test, slightly higher than Apple — yet it scored 3,434 points in the single-core and 9,334 in the multi-core test. This means the A20 Pro is approximately 38 percent faster in a single core and 35 percent faster in all cores. The difference isn’t made by megahertz, but by architecture.

Where Apple Loses

More interesting is the battle with Xring O3, Xiaomi’s own chip, which we wrote about in connection with the Pad 9 Pro Max tablet. It scored 3,699 points in the single-core and 14,350 in the multi-core test. While Apple maintains a lead of approximately 28 percent in a single core, Xiaomi beats it by about 14 percent in multi-core performance. And it’s no wonder — the Chinese chip has ten cores compared to Apple’s six.

MediaTek, with its Dimensity 9600 Pro, according to leaked results, hovers around 3,400 points in the single-core and 12,000 in the multi-core test — so in total cores, it’s quite close to Apple, but significantly lags in a single core.

Graphics Forty Percent Higher

A separate graphics test yielded 64,069 points in Geekbench Metal, while last year’s A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro Max managed 45,683. This represents an approximately forty percent increase, which is not insignificant for one generation and confirms the numbers announced by Apple. This is thanks to an additional graphics core and the transition to a newer TSMC 2nm manufacturing process.

It’s worth adding the usual caveat: these are individual tests, not averages from dozens of measurements, and some competitor results come from pre-production samples. The true picture will only emerge from tests of finished devices — but the direction is clear.

When choosing a phone, is single-core performance more important to you, or all cores combined?

Source: Notebookcheck, Geekbench