Apple's A17 Pro Within 10% of Intel's i9-13900K, AMD's 7950X in Single-Core Performance

iPhone 15 Pro in black, white, blue and natural titanium.
(Image credit: Apple)

Apple's latest A17 Pro system-on-chip for smartphones made on TSMC's N3 production node delivers single-thread performance which challenges that of AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X and Intel's Core i9-13900K processors in Geekbench 6. There is a catch though: Apple's A17 Pro operates at 3.75 GHz, according to the benchmark, whereas its mighty competitors work at about 5.80 GHz and 6.0 GHz, respectively.

Apple's A17 Pro SoC maintained the company's renowned six-core configuration and packs two high-performance cores functioning at up to 3.77 GHz and four energy-efficient cores operating at a lower frequency. When compared to the A16 Bionic (made on TSMC's N4), the A17 Pro boosts the maximum clock-speed of performance cores by 8.95% (from 3.46 GHz), which is in line with what TSMC's N3 (3nm-class) process technology offers compared to its 5nm-class counterparts (+10% ~ +15% compared to N5, about 10% compared to N4).

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Row 0 - Cell 0 A17 ProA16 BionicCore i9-13900KAMD Ryzen 9 7950XSnapdragon 8 Gen 2
General specifications2P+4E, up to 3.77 GHz2P+4E, up to 3.46 GHz8P+16E/32T, 3.0 GHz - 5.80 GHz16P/32T, up to 5.70 GHz5P+3E, up to 3.19 GHz
Single-Core29142641322331722050
Multi-Core7199698922744222405405

As far as single-core performance of Apple's A17 Pro in Geekbench 6 is concerned, it is 10% faster than its predecessor, the A16 Bionic, which leads to a question regarding whether Apple introduced any microarchitectural CPU improvements with its latest SoC. Of course, Apple's custom core is traditionally faster than those developed by Arm itself.

Scoring 2,900 points in single-thread Geekbench 6 workload is good enough to challenge many desktop-class processors, but trails the fastest models by ~10%. So, one could say that Apple's high-performance cores could challenge Raptor Cove and Zen 4 cores when working at around 3.77 GHz, at least in this specific benchmark. As always, one benchmark doesn't tell the full story. 

When it comes to multi-core performance, Apple's A17 Pro can only score about 7,200 points, which is only 3% higher than A16 Bionic.  Six cores cannot beat processors that have significantly more cores, yet A17 Pro remains the fastest smartphone SoC around, at least when compared to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

When Apple formally introduced its A17 Pro system-on-chip (SoC) earlier this week, it said that its high-performance cores deliver a 10% increase in single-thread workloads compared to its predecessor. Apparently, this was an accurate estimate and the new processor delivers single-thread performance that is competitive with some PC processors while working at a considerably lower frequency. Meanwhile, it looks like Apple has made little to no architectural changes to its A17 Pro CPU cores and only boosted clocks.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • Order 66
    It will be interesting to see how the A17 pro performs in RT if/when mobile games release supporting it. My prediction is that it will do well but I don't really see the point of RT for a phone soc because the chip is going to have to use so much more power to use RT that battery life probably won't be great when using RT.
    Reply
  • gg83
    This seems like an advertisement and what's this chip "challenging"? Useless benchmark?
    Reply
  • teodoreh
    In other news, RTX4070's single CUDA core performance is identical to RTX4090's!
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    to be fair I will say one thing in defense of the intel/amd cpu's....They are always going to be less "efficient" due to how much mroe complex the pipeline for any windows/linux (not sure on macs as havent used one in 25+yrs) OS is. Same reason consoles can do so well vs pc even if specs are vastly different that much less complex pipeline.


    when your device has a lot less stuff to run in background and hoops to jump through you get better performance.


    I don't like Apple as a company nor would I use their stuff due to that, but as a technology their chips probably best designed than any other.
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    I remember all the noise Apple made about the M1 that also had good ST performance but also a node advantage. Once AMD and Intel moved to newer nodes that advantage went away. And even if you compare apple now on 3nm still behind AMD on 5nm and intel on its current.
    Reply
  • zecoeco
    Apple should care less about synthetic benchamarks and more about real-world performance that is achieveable through the optimizations and uniformity of their ecosystem. Hardware is way ahead, while software is crappled, unoptimized and unable to utilize this performance effectively. Winning the "watts" war isn't going to benefit anyone but the "hardcore" people out there looking for the smallest yet most expensive drop of perfomance at the cost of power and price.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    hotaru251 said:
    to be fair I will say one thing in defense of the intel/amd cpu's....They are always going to be less "efficient" due to how much mroe complex the pipeline for any windows/linux (not sure on macs as havent used one in 25+yrs) OS is. Same reason consoles can do so well vs pc even if specs are vastly different that much less complex pipeline.
    macOS is Unix based (OpenBSD to be exact), the "pipeline" is pretty much the same as Linux (In fact it can run almost all the same things Linux can). It's also still runs on Intel based Macs.

    One can argue that Apple has tighter integration and maybe using custom OP codes to optimize their software on their own chips, but I don't think generic OS pipelines are the reason why they are more/less efficient.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    Makaveli said:
    I remember all the noise Apple made about the M1 that also had good ST performance but also a node advantage. Once AMD and Intel moved to newer nodes that advantage went away. And even if you compare apple now on 3nm still behind AMD on 5nm and intel on its current.
    Your comparing an 8.5 watt TDP part to a 100+ watt TDP part. In no world is that an apples to apples comparison and not even worth mentioning.
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    JamesJones44 said:
    Your comparing an 8.5 watt TDP part to a 100+ watt TDP part. In no world is that an apples to apples comparison and not even worth mentioning.
    I know its apples vs orange but the article itself has the comparison so why not point it out.
    Reply
  • The Historical Fidelity
    JamesJones44 said:
    macOS is Unix based (OpenBSD to be exact), the "pipeline" is pretty much the same as Linux. This has nothing to do with the chips efficiency.

    You can argue that Apple has tighter integration and maybe using custom OP codes to optimize their software on their own chips, but generic OS reasons are not why they are more/less efficient.
    I think what he is trying to get at is the inefficiency of x86 architecture with all of its useless legacy micro operations. Every x86 design has to provide hardware that can execute this legacy code and this both takes up valuable space and prevents micro-architects from fully optimizing logic features without having to compromise to ensure legacy features will still work.

    Intel has said they plan to remove useless legacy operations from x86 to improve its performance and allow full optimization of logic units for modern operations.
    Reply