Apple is the king of IPC.
Apple’s new A19 Pro chip for the iPhone 17 was announced yesterday and the first Geekbench scores have been uploaded. To be quite frank, if this was a new x86 CPU for gaming PCs, we’d be losing our minds.
The A19 Pro is scoring nearly 4,000 points in Geekbench 6’s single-thread test. That compares with about 3,500 for the best AMD desktop CPU. And may I remind you, that’s in a freaking phone. The A19 Pro in a desktop with the power budget and thermals that affords would be higher still, well over 4,000.
If a new AMD or Intel CPU popped up in Geekbench hitting, say, 4,500, the internet would just about break. And to be clear, these Geekbench numbers for the A19 Pro are plausible. The previous-gen A18 Pro scores around 3,500 points in Geekbench 6. So, a 15% boost to 4,000 points for the latest chip fitted to a phone with a new vapor chamber cooling system doesn’t seem like a massive stretch.
Of course, Geekbench is hardly the perfect benchmark. And it’s demonstrably not a game. But comparative real-world performance in applications doesn’t tend to be a million miles away from Geekbench. The bottom line here is that Apple has long had a clear IPC or single-core and per-clock-cycle performance advantage over x86 chips from AMD and Intel, and it looks like the new A19 Pro chip will maintain that lead.
