iPhone 17 chip becomes the fastest single-core CPU in the world on PassMark

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apples-a19-becomes-the-fastest-single-core-cpu-in-the-world-on-passmark-beating-pc-chips-and-apples-own-m3-ultra-passively-cooled-iphone-17-chip-catapults-past-power-hungry-competitors

by fork-bomber • 10 months ago

128 183 10 months ago

tomshardware.com

MBCook3• 10 months ago

I can’t wait to see the numbers from the next M-series chip that integrates these core designs.

I don’t know if that will be the M5 or M6 series but with active cooling and wall/big battery power I bet it will be impressive.

And a pro/ultra variant with lots of cores might post some very nice multi core numbers.

Way to go Apple. That’s a great accomplishment.

cosmic_cheese5• 10 months ago

This bodes well for the rumored entry level MacBook with an A-series chip inside. If they can get the price on those down to $500-$600 it’ll run circles around everything else at the price point.

wmf2• 10 months ago

Yeah, several people noticed that the A19 has similar performance to the M2 which is still a great CPU.

kube-system2• 10 months ago

The M2 scores 3894 on single core. At 5149, this should be noticeably (~30%) faster in single threaded applications.

kjkjadksj3• 10 months ago

It will probably have no fan and throttle under real work like the m series air.

cosmic_cheese5• 10 months ago

Not really a problem with how those usually only throttle with sustained load. Very few people do anything that keeps the CPU tied up for longer than a minute or two.

mogwire• 10 months ago

I use my M4 MBA as my personal laptop. Never once felt I was overloading it an it was being throttled.

Claude Code, some light video and photo editing, YouTube, and Netflix.

Not sure what others using an entry level laptop would expect it to do.

lm284692• 10 months ago

I'm a backend dev, I've been using a base model m1 air since it was released, I've never felt it slow down, I still have no reason to update. 99% of people who will buy these entry level machines will not hit thermal throttling or if they do they won't care

kube-system2• 10 months ago

I've been using an M1 since release date and I never have my fans kick in unless I'm doing something that pegs CPU for minutes on end. The last time I noticed fans spinning was the last time I ran a benchmark.

The A series has been passively cooled for 15 years inside of systems with much less thermal mass.

CryptoBanker• 10 months ago

I disagree. I’ve used a M1 air as my daily driver at work for the last four years. It only ever truly throttles during periods where I’m running one build after another for ~half an hour plus. If anything, the limit on memory to 16GB is the real killer

commandersaki15• 10 months ago

It will probably have no fan and throttle under real work like the m series air.

Ah but a Chromebook or low end budget PC laptop will? From experience these things fire up like jet engines just to open a text editor.

wiseowise• 10 months ago

I'm using M3 Air for a zoo of development (from native code compilation, to high level orchestration) and it barely loads the CPU.

brokencode2• 10 months ago

Sure, under a heavy sustained multithreaded load it’ll throttle.

But the average user will never encounter this. Typical web browsing and office tasks are bursty and mostly single threaded.

Gaming is the only area where it may be more of a problem. But it’s fine for this to simply not be a great gaming laptop. Most laptops aren’t.

mcintyre1994• 10 months ago

Surely the cost to Apple of A-series vs M-series isn't that significant though? I'd think they'd need to cut a lot (or their margin) to get down to that price point on a laptop.

cosmic_cheese5• 10 months ago

One big difference is volume. They sell way, way more A-series devices than M-series devices and so they may benefit from economy of scale.

With all of Apple's service offerings these days, they could also potentially justify slim margins by positioning the A-series MacBook as both a loss leader and gateway drug.

wilsonnb3• 10 months ago

Mac mini at 600, MacBook Air at 1000

Apple TV 4K at 200, MacBook at 600

Back of the napkin math but it checks out.

GeekyBear9• 10 months ago

The M1 Air at Wal-Mart has gone on sale for as low as $599 already. The M4 Air goes on sale for $799 pretty regularly.

I would expect to see them use the same sort of game plan for an A series MacBook that they used with the iPhone SE.

Use previous gen parts for items like the screen and body (for cost savings) along with current gen SOCs.

paxys2• 10 months ago

The future is going to be a single line of chips that goes into iPhone, iPad and Mac. Pricing doesn't have much to do with it. If Apple wanted to sell a $500 MacBook they would have done it already. The processor isn't what is standing in the way.

cosmic_cheese5• 10 months ago

They could technically do it today but I imagine they want differentiation so that the cheap MacBook doesn't cannibalize sales of the Air and Pro too heavily.

mmcnl• 10 months ago

What do you mean "future"? This is already the case. M-series chips share the same architecture with A-series CPUs. If you increase the A19 core count you'll end up with something close to M5.

commandersaki15• 10 months ago

It would be nice to have these CPUs benchmarked like for like using the same OS as the M-series. Unsure if that changes anything.

layer82• 10 months ago

If only it were open to other operating systems.

andrewmcwatters3• 10 months ago

Wouldn't it be so cool if you could actually do anything with it? Imagine building a Bugatti and installing an unremovable speed limiter that forced you to top out at 75 MPH, because of course you're never going to take it to a track.

It was only intended for highway travel at best.

But hey, you can scroll at 120hz now, right? Think different!

All this tells me is that Intel and AMD are the only manufacturers making leading chips that you can do anything with.

Edit: Fixed last sentence.

bogwog• 10 months ago

I agree with what you said but...

Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips

lol wat

tredre3• 10 months ago

All this tells me is that Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips that you can do anything with.

From context you seem to be talking about overclocking. In which case only a handful of Intel chips are unlocked per generation. By contrast, most of AMD chips are unlocked.

patchymcnoodles• 10 months ago

As another commenter said, the part with Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips, doesn't really makes sense.

Right now Intel is losing a lot, lucky to them Nvidia invested. So far I would only use AMD. In my desktop is an AMD, because it is just the fastest desktop CPU und the threadrippers are absolute multicore beasts for servers.

freedomben4• 10 months ago

I've been super impressed with AMD chips as well. I have actually had to try to find CPU bound use cases because the damn thing is so fast it makes you question if it actually worked

rudimentary_phy• 10 months ago

I'm not sure about the Intel thing, but I agree that it would be nice to be able to use it the way you want.

You're talking about a company that limits you from having a comma on the front of the iPhone keyboard. Why?

2OEH8eoCRo0• 10 months ago

Bicycle for the mind! /s

semireg• 10 months ago

Cars are often artificially detuned to the trim level that’s inscribed on the boot.

cortesoft• 10 months ago

You can’t do anything with AMD chips?

NaomiLehman• 10 months ago

what? Intel chips are the worst out of all of them. AMD is steadily gaining % in supercomputers.

M silicon is very efficient on workstations for dev work.

freedomben4• 10 months ago

Upvoted because 90% of your comment is great so doesn't deserve to be grayed out, but the Intel bit is wrong. I would definitely recommend checking out AMDs offerings and then backpedaling on the Intel claim because even my four year old AMD chip absolutely screams

andrewmcwatters3• 10 months ago

I use AMD chips, so I’m not terribly swayed by these numbers. I fixed the sentence to reflect my sentiments.

whynotminot4• 10 months ago

What is the thing you are trying to do?

These phones record 4K video at 120 frames a second.

They play high intensity video games.

They run on device language models.

People keep their iPhones for years — this power will ensure these phones can run iOS versions 5, 6, even 7 years from now.

And the uArch you’re seeing here will end up re-purposed for big brother M series chips in laptops and desktops.

So what exactly do you want?

zamadatix15• 10 months ago

This is what they are saying - the power is there, but iOS severely gets in the way of interacting with it properly any time you step out of the box of "touch first Apple approved mobile experiences". It'd be awesome if one device could be my phone and laptop instead of trying to make do with the screen share on two completely separate systems.

The iPads even more so, as some literally have the same kinds of hardware as a MacBook already (minus the keyboard detaches).

lomase7• 10 months ago

I sad that in a place with hacker on its name people are contrarian when somebody wants to use the computer they bougth for whatever they want.

andrewmcwatters3• 10 months ago

It’s definitely sad and weird. Times and people have changed.

For whatever reason the community now is filled with a weird mix of corporate bootlickers who want to give the largest corporations money while they take away our freedoms and they simultaneously want to make known their entitled behavior by claiming individual developers and small businesses should only ever give away their software for free.

It was bad enough people here chime in technical conversations that they have no experience with loudly contesting the points of actual experts and practitioners, but now they also want to tell us that we don’t have a right to use our property how we want.

trallnag• 10 months ago

It's the Apple bias

commandersaki15• 10 months ago

Imagine building a Bugatti and installing an unremovable speed limiter that forced you to top out at 75 MPH

What workload are you envisaging to be run on an iPhone where this even matters? Hyperbole aside, what target population of iPhone users even care about overclocking, and specifically what tangible benefit will they get out of it?

alex9892• 10 months ago

You are completely missing his point. It's not about the mhz, it's about making a super high performence product but refusing to let you use it for things that actually benefit from that performance.

lomase7• 10 months ago

The guy you are replying to. They are the target population. Or myself.

If I pay for hardware, I want to use it however I want. I know that is a fucking crazy idea for them corporation bootlickers.

musicale2• 10 months ago

All this tells me is that Intel and AMD are the only manufacturers making leading chips that you can do anything with.

I've heard that Nvidia makes some GPUs that you can do things with.

ranger_danger• 10 months ago

What can't you do that 99% of customers actually want to do with it?

DSingularity• 10 months ago

Why is the pro scoring less?

layer82• 10 months ago

“Both the A19 and A19 Pro benchmarked within the margin of error of each other”

12_throw_away• 10 months ago

Because error bars and p-values don't make for exciting headlines with well-defined "rankings"

pcurve• 10 months ago

A19 = 5177 A19 Pro = 5123 A18 Pro = 4130 A18 chip = 3928 A17 Pro = 4528 A16 = 4011

Not sure why the A18 passmark scores are quite a bit lower than A17

Veliladon• 10 months ago

Because the A18 had its L2 and LLC caches slashed in half. Frequency and uarch improvements don’t matter if you can’t keep the ports fed.

StopDisinfo9103• 10 months ago

It’s a really a shame to put such a good cpu in such an artificially limited phone. Apple already has all the elements required for effective convergence but would rather have us lug gimped devices out of greed. The current situation is so sad for actual innovation.

I don’t want a MacBook with an A19, I want to use the A19 I already have connected to a screen and a keyboard with a proper software stack.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 10 months ago

The vast majority of the market is totally uninterested in docking their phone like that though. So Apple et all are making a reasonable choice.

bigyabai3• 10 months ago

So Apple et all are making a reasonable choice.

Interesting how people rationalize this stuff. My phone can dock to a screen; I've never used the feature, but it doesn't obstruct anything I do. It's a nice-to-have, and it would be kinda appealing if Firefox and Spotify both work like normal. I might even deign to say I could get work done on it (though I've never tried).

Presumably the real reason is that Apple is still afraid to segment their market. A plug-in iPhone would stop people from buying the AppleTV or Mac Mini for home theater applications.

dclowd9901• 10 months ago

As someone who loves their laptop, I couldn't disagree more. I would absolutely love a single device with that kind of flexibility.

paxys2• 10 months ago

The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.

The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.

zamadatix15• 10 months ago

I thought the same about putting keyboards on iPads, especially with how limited those still are, but now I don't know what to expect.

bapak• 10 months ago

The vast majority of the market is totally uninterested in docking their phone like that though

s/uninterested/unaware/

In reality, for such hardware to make sense, it would have to be a full MacBook Air minus the PCB. Would you be willing to spend 500-1000 USD for a piece of hardware that only works when your phone is connected? (i.e. an iPhone accessory)

GeekyBear9• 10 months ago

It would be interesting to see a tablet sized dual mode device where the OS and user apps could seamlessly switch back and forth between a 100% touch mode UI and a 100% precision pointing mode UI without restarting or losing data.

It would mean a lot more work for developers though if your app needs two different UI designs.

One issue that sticks out is that touch controls of a usable size just take up so much more screen space.

Also, look at how many years it took Microsoft to provide touch friendly access to the Windows control panels.

7thpower3• 10 months ago

You seem very confident.

Did you come to that conclusion based on the market not using a product that doesn’t exist?

oliwarner• 10 months ago

I think this is a pretty poor reading of the market. Everyone has a phone. An increasing segment now has little access to desktop or laptop computing. I know I hate that I have to pick up my laptop to do relatively small tasks that I'm halfway through on my phone.

Offering a dockable screen/keyboard/mouse, using the phone battery/compute/storage seems like it would be trivial for Apple.

Obviously cannibalises laptop or tablet sales, but that's not the market's disinterest.

amelius2• 10 months ago

People are OK with a dictator as long as they think they are acting in their interest.

See Apple, but also US politics.

schaefer• 10 months ago

and Linus?

GeekyBear9• 10 months ago

Speak for yourself.

I stopped using Windows when Microsoft made it obvious that they fully intend to force users to use an online account to log into their own local machine.

Requiring an online account if you want to use optional online features was perfectly acceptable.

Needing an online account to access your own PC?

Absolutely not.

EasyMark• 10 months ago

I'd be happy with a mac tablet running the A19 with a cut to the bone macos, that would be quite something.

dzhiurgis2• 10 months ago

MacBook logic board is probably less than 20% of its total cost.

So by the time you put screen, speakers, keyboard, trackpad, battery, ports, case, hinge, charging into your dock you might as well computer there.

philistine• 10 months ago

Yeah, I totally agree with you but usually people who complain about not being able to plug their phone want a desktop, not a laptop. Even then, sitting down at a desk gives you a thermal envelope that is only limited by the noise of its cooling, so you can put extremely powerful chips on desktops again defeating the purpose.

StopDisinfo9103• 10 months ago

I don’t want a laptop dock. I want to be able to connect my phone to the dock I already have on my desk or carry with me a foldable screen and keyboard when I need portability. That would give me a larger lighter screen that a MacBook and a better typing experience. I already have headphones. I already have a secondary battery. Actually make all of this wireless and that would be perfect. Plus if the screen support touch you have a tablet.

The laptop has a device makes less and less sense now that the cpu and gpu inside a phone are good enough for most. It’s propped up only because phone providers artificially limit what the software on the phone can do.

eboynyc32• 10 months ago

What can’t you do on your phone? You can even code it.

lysace4• 10 months ago

We need modern open source CPU benchmarks.

PassMark and Geekbench are closed source. I don't know why I should trust them to e.g. treat fundamentally different kinds of devices in a sane and fair way. They have vastly different cooling mechanisms, for one. It matters if they can sustain a certain load for 5 minutes or for 5 hours.

Etheryte• 10 months ago

In some other context I'd be inclined to agree, but I swear the moment there's an open benchmark, it's going to get gamed by someone. So long as there's money to be made, the incentives don't align, look at Volkswagen for some inspiration.

lysace4• 10 months ago

Is it really harder for CPU designers to game closed source benchmarks?

zamadatix15• 10 months ago

If you have a specific use case in mind you might as well just test that use case directly. E.g. PTS (Phoronix Test Suite) is not a traditional benchmark, it's a workload tester, and it's right up that alley (though you then run into the problem of "the workload I care to compare doesn't run on an iPhone at all", at which point you either compare generalities again or don't care anymore).

lysace4• 10 months ago

I suppose what I really mean is for the industry to agree on some benchmark or two. Like the 80s PC mag benchmarks.

It obviously doesn't scale well if every potential end user has to benchmark every device.

wmf2• 10 months ago

SPEC exists. Apparently reviewers who speak English can't afford it.

lysace4• 10 months ago

Not really open source, no.

GeekyBear9• 10 months ago

Pour one out for Anandtech.

SPEC has been the industry standard performance benchmark for comparing between different CPU architectures for decades.

It takes all freaking day to run, but Anandtech published the benchmarks as soon as they got their grubby little hands on a new core design for every well known architecture.

Is GeekerWan on YouTube the only outlet still doing this today, albeit in Chinese with English subtitles?

You would think that Chips and Cheese, at least, would take up the gauntlet.

Waraqa• 10 months ago

This is great news for the entire ARM ecosystem. The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit.

freedomben4• 10 months ago

The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit.

Haven't they been playing leap frog for years now? I avoid the ARM ecosystem now because of how non-standardized BIOS is (especially after being burned with several different SoC purchases), and I prefer compatibility over performance, but I think there have been some high performance ARM chips for quite some time

mattbillenstein• 10 months ago

I came to realize by soldering a lot of fast ram on to the board of newer laptops and phones, maybe it's not the instruction set that matters that much.

Modern Apple hardware has so much more memory bandwidth than the x86 systems they're being compared to - I'm not sure it's apples to apples.

lordnacho• 10 months ago

I talked to a guy who'd worked at Apple on the chips. He more or less said the same thing, it's the memory that's all the difference.

This makes a lot of sense. If the calculations are fast, they need to be fed quickly. You don't want to spend a bunch of time shuffling various caches.

zamadatix15• 10 months ago

Memory bandwidth/latency is helpful in certain scenarios, but it can be easily oversold in the performance portion of the story. E.g. the 9950X and 9950X3D are within less than 1/20th of a percentage point of each other in PassMark Single thread (feeding a single core is dead easy) but have a spread of ~6.4% (in favor of the 9950X3D) in the multi-thread (where the cache is starting to help on the one CCD). It could just as easily have been in the other direction or 10 times as much depending on what the benchmark was trying to do. For most day to day user workloads the performance difference from memory bandwidth/latency is the "nil to some" though.

Meanwhile the AI Max+ 395 has at least twice the bandwidth + same number of cores and comes to more like a ~15% loss on single and ~30% loss on multithread due to other "traditional" reasons for performance difference. I still like my 395 though, but more for the following reason.

The more practical advantage of soldered memory on mobile devices is the power/heat reductions, same with increasing the cache on e-cores to get something out of every possible cycle you power rather than try to increase the overall computation with more wattage (i.e. transistors or clocks). Better bandwidth/latency is a cool bonus though.

For a hard number the iPhone 17 Pro Max is supposed to be around 76 GB/s, yet my iPhone 17 Pro Max has a higher PassMark single core performance score than my 9800X3D with larger L3 cache and RAM operating at >100 GB/s. The iPhone does have a TSMC node advantage to consider as well, but I still think it just comes out ahead due to "better overall engineering".

hamandcheese• 10 months ago

It's very possible I am misinterpreting, but the A19 seems to have less total memory bandwidth than, say, a 9800x (but not by much). And far less than the Max and Ultra chips that go into MacBooks.

So I think there's more to it than memory bandwidth.

hajile3• 10 months ago

A19 has WAY less bandwidth on its 64-bit bus than desktop chips with 128-bit busses . AMD’s strix halo is also slower despite a 256-bit bus.

Pushing this point further, x86 chips are also slower when the entire task fits in cache.

The real observation is how this isn’t some Apple black magic. All three of the big ARM core designers (Apple, ARM, and Qualcomm) are now beating x86 in raw performance and stomping them in performance per watt (and in performance per watt per area).

It’s not just apples deep pockets either. AMD spent more in R&D than ARM’s entire gross profit margin last I checked. Either AMD sucks or x86 has more technical roadblocks than some people like to believe.

omikun• 10 months ago

X86 compete based on clock speed for the longest time so they use cell libraries designed for higher that. This means the transistors are larger and less dense. Arm cores are targeted at energy efficiency first so they use denser cells that doesn’t clock as fast. The trade off is they can have larger reorder buffers and larger scheduling windows to squeeze better ipc. As frequency scaling slows but not so much density scaling you get better results going the slower route.

mensetmanusman• 10 months ago

Microsoft outlook and PowerPoint will still take 15 seconds to open your document.

pizlonator• 10 months ago

This is cool but it’s just one benchmark. It’s not clear to me what exactly PassMark even measures. That doesn’t mean the result is “wrong” but take it with a grain of salt

osti• 10 months ago

Apple chips are fastest in single core in most benchmarks, not just passmark.

nicce2• 10 months ago

Imagine if they would just sell those CPUs for other use cases. Put 2x price tag if they fear losing other hardware sales.

commandersaki15• 10 months ago

Qualcomm & Samsung kind of fill the market for high end mobile CPU though. I don't know what Apple brings to the table if their CPUs are used outside of their designs.

CaptainOfCoit• 10 months ago

I don't know what Apple brings to the table if their CPUs are used outside of their designs.

Sounds like Apple brings the fastest single-core CPU in the world, so if you're looking for that, it would have been nice.

Aurornis3• 10 months ago

There are already CPUs from companies like Qualcomm that come close in performance and are available to anyone with a large bank account.

The iPhone chips are great but even if they were 2X as fast as the competition it’s not going to open up an entire new world of use cases that don’t already exist

MBCook3• 10 months ago

What do you think goes into the M series chips in their computers?

It’s the same core designs.

There are more of ‘em (and GPU), not restricted by battery power, and other useful things for computers that aren’t as constrained as a phone.

But they’re the same cores.

nicce2• 10 months ago

Quite the contrary. Apple's IP cores are in-house developed and as far as we know, quite different from competitors.

Aurornis3• 10 months ago

PassMark single threaded test is a very simple synthetic benchmark according to their docs:

The single threaded test is an aggregate of the floating point, string sorting and data compression tests.

It’s an impressive score, but there’s more to performance in real apps than these three simple tests. This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip and the great job they did keeping it fed, but PassMark single threaded is about the simplest measurement you can do.

Modern CPUs aren’t really optimized for peak floating point throughput because any GPU will do a much better job at that. It’s also not clear if they actually use SIMD features of the chips, where desktop and server class parts should be able to walk away from the Apple phone chip due to their higher power limit alone.

GeekyBear9• 10 months ago

This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip

Apple's in house silicon strategy has long been to create wide cores that perform more instructions per clock cycle and then run the cores at a conservative clock speed for power savings.

Running up the clock speed for performance no matter what effect that has on power consumption and heat has been what we've seen from Qualcomm/Intel/AMD/Nvidia.

In Geekbench multicore:

the A19 Pro delivered a powerful multi-core score of 11,054... while using a remarkably low 12.1W of power... To put that into perspective, other flagship chips from the Android camp had to push their power consumption much higher to even come close to its scores. The Snapdragon 8 Elite, for instance, had to use 17W of power to complete the same benchmark. Meanwhile, the Dimensity 9400 consumed a staggering 18.4W.

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/09/apple-a19-pro-chip-...

evanjrowley• 10 months ago

Another reason why Apple should allow the UTM project to use the JIT API in their iOS app. I want to virtualize ARM64 Linux VMs on the fastest CPU in the world. Apple could put Android's Termux to shame, but they don't want to do that, and therefore I have no use for them. What great things are iPhone users going to do with a fast locked down phone? Play Roblox at 120 FPS? Doom scroll at 2x speed? Not know how to use their phone (but faster)?

Jotalea• 10 months ago

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/

iPhone 17 chip becomes the fastest single-core CPU in the world on PassMark

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