Apple's iPhone 17 chip becomes the fastest single-core CPU in the world on PassMark, beating PC chips and Apple's own M3 Ultra — passively-cooled A19 CPU catapults past power-hungry competitors

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A19 has everyone beat, including Apple itself.

Apple A19
(Image credit: Apple)

Apple's latest generation of iPhones is equipped with its A19 chips — the standard A19 on iPhone 17 and the A19 Pro on iPhone 17 Air and Pros — which represent the best the company has to offer, literally. In PassMark's single-threaded benchmark, the A19 produced the best numbers of any chip available, including fully-fledged desktop SKUs. It did that while consuming significantly less power and being passively cooled. At least in this hyper-specific case, Apple's A19 has become the fastest CPU available.

Both the A19 and A19 Pro benchmarked within the margin of error of each other; however, officially, it was the regular A19 that posted 5,149 points to claim the single-thread performance crown. The A19 Pro scored 5,088 points, which makes sense considering both chips share the same cores, just differing amounts of them. The A19 beats heavy hitters like Apple's own desktop-class M3 Ultra (both 28- and 32-core variants), Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K, and even the EPYC 4585PX from AMD — all of which would be actively cooled.

The tweet caption lists nominal TDPs of these chips for comparison, but that's not what a single-core load would actually use. Since it's incredibly difficult to pinpoint that, PassMark itself estimated the single-threaded power consumption in a reply, saying the A19 is likely using 4W, the 285K is using 44W, and the EPYC is using 56W. Even if those 1/3 assumptions are wrong, the delta is so high between the three that it doesn't really matter. The A19 is miles ahead in terms of efficiency.

Where it falters, of course, is multi-threaded performance. It doesn't scale upward when you take more/all cores into account, but that's to be expected with a mobile-only chip, given that it simply has fewer cores than every other CPU on the list. Moreover, keep in mind that the A19 is inside the iPhone 17, which doesn't have a vapor chamber, so it's even more impressive for it to pull these kinds of numbers. Then again, this isn't precisely an uber-scientific test, so don't take these results at face value.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Gururu
    How come the AMDs suck so bad?
    Reply
  • Sippincider
    Very nice. Maybe I'm an outlier, but phone processors and cameras have been mass overkill for anything I've needed for several years now.

    Like when the classic auto industry chased itself with the tallest fins and biggest V8s. I just need to get between places...
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    Gururu said:
    How come the AMDs suck so bad?
    AMD want to milk the consumer... not give the real performance.

    Apple and nvidia will take all market share possible.
    Reply
  • Exploding PSU
    Sippincider said:
    Very nice. Maybe I'm an outlier, but phone processors and cameras have been mass overkill for anything I've needed for several years now.

    Like when the classic auto industry chased itself with the tallest fins and biggest V8s. I just need to get between places...

    I remember back in Snapdragon 808 / 810 days (those were the years when I still followed smartphone hardware rather closely), I thought the exact same thing. A few Windows Phone models were able to run a version of Windows 10, and to me that signified we had reached the top pinnacle of smartphone CPU hardware.

    I mean, come to think of it, a smartphone could run a PC operating system! The hardware got to be insanely overkill. Coupled with SD 810's overheating problem, I thought there wouldn't be anything faster from that point on when it comes to phone CPU.

    But look at where we are today... I have a super old LG G4 with a 808, which was one of the top flagship back in the day, and it can't even run the YouTube app now. A quick glance at some Geekbench numbers show that my midrange Samsung A-series has almost 7 times higher score in the multi-core test compared to the G4.

    March of progress is scary sometimes...
    Reply
  • FunSurfer
    A19 beats A19 Pro? Wait for the A19 Lite!
    Reply
  • Notton
    Gururu said:
    How come the AMDs suck so bad?
    Probably because the benchmark heavily favors productivity tasks that don't rely on a large cache.
    Cinebench, for instance, heavily favors Intel over AMD.

    However the roles are completely reversed in games, with the i9-285K being slower than the R7 9800X3D. Heck, even the i9-14900K will beat the i9-285K in games.
    Reply
  • Dementoss
    Gururu said:
    How come the AMDs suck so bad?
    Think about what you're saying before you type...

    How many people or organisations, that buy R9 9950 X3D or, EPYC 4565P CPUs do you think are going to be buying either of those, on the basis of their single-core performance?
    Reply