The iPhone XS and XS Max are the first iPhones to comes with 4GB of RAM. The iPhone XR gets 3GB of RAM similar to the iPhone X.
When Apple announces a new iPhone, it usually spends a lot of time talking about the design, the cameras and the chipset powering the latest and “best” iPhone yet. However, the company is also known to keep a few key details in the dark during the keynote such as the size of the battery inside the iPhone or the amount of memory. These details usually emerge after some benchmark and teardown tests, and things are already underway. We now know how much RAM the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR bring courtesy Geekbench.
The three new iPhones recently got benchmarked, revealing that the iPhone XS and XS Max are the first iPhones to come with 4GB of RAM. This is 1GB more than the iPhone X last year. Now, it’s widely known that Apple is pretty conservative with its RAM offering, which is largely because of some neat optimisation between the hardware and software. The bump here with the iPhone XS and XS Max is significant and suggests some pretty great performance on offer when coupled with a 7nm A12 Bionic chipset. The listing reveals that the A12 chip comes with a clock speed of 2.49GHz which is slightly higher than the 2.39GHz A11 Bionic.
The iPhone XR also gets the A12 Bionic chipset, but with 3GB of RAM. The benchmark listing also reveals multi-core and single-core performance of the new A12 chip and the numbers look good, although only marginally better than the A11 Bionic. The iPhone XS Max got a single-core score of 4813 and a multi-core score of 10266, which is an improvement over the A11 Bionic-powered iPhone X last year which had a single-core and multi-core score of 4202 and 10165 on Geekbench. Interestingly the iPhone XR has been listed with a single-core score of 4754 and multi-core score of 9367. This suggests multi-core performance of the iPhone XR is weaker than the iPhone X. Of course, these benchmark score don’t reflect real-world results and the A12 Bionic promises some really good CPU and GPU performance output and energy efficiency than ever before.
During the event on Wednesday, Apple announced that the A12 Bionic chip, which is based on a 7nm process, brings a 6-core CPU with 2 performance cores that deliver up to 15 per cent faster performance compared to A11 Bionic and up to 40 per cent more battery efficient. The GPU is also 50 per cent faster than its predecessor. Apple also said that the A12 chip can do 5 trillion Neural Engine operations per second compared to 600 billion operations of the A11.