Early benchmarks of the iPhone 13's A15 Bionic chip have shown once again that Apple's phone has the performance to crush the silicon in even the best Android phones.
New details claimed by Ice Universe and MacRumors reveal two interesting things about Apple's new silicon. Firstly, that it's still the most powerful mobile chip around, according to Geekbench 5 results tallied up against the benchmarks we have for Android phones using the Snapdragon 888. Secondly, that Apple's managed to do this without changing the amount of RAM it's phones have.
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According to the Geekbench Browser screenshots provided by Ice Universe, the iPhone 13 scored 1,734 in the single-core test and 4,818 in the multi-core test in Geekbench 5.
Apple A15 Geekbench score, only one word left to Android: despair. pic.twitter.com/luxuWmUZlZSeptember 16, 2021
Compared to the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which scored 1,603 and 4,111, it's a modest improvement over the year-old chip. Android phones fall further behind though. The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra managed a paltry 1,123 and 3,440 by comparison, with its Snapdragon 888 chip.
This is to be expected as Apple's in-house designed A-series chips have long beaten those from the likes of Qualcomm and Samsung's Exynos line in, in benchmark results at least. In practical terms, such performance has meant iPhones have pretty much always felt super-smooth to use in a variety of tasks, even though some of their specs look wreaker compared to Android phones.
This could change with the Samsung Galaxy S22 though. Recent leaked benchmarks show the in-development Exynos 2200 chip that will be found in Samsung's next flagship phone scored incredibly high on graphical benchmark tests. Whether this translates to the final product and across all use cases remains to be seen. But it looks as if Apple's A15 chip will provide some tough competition.
An interesting tidbit relating to the A15's performance is that Apple hasn't upped the RAM in the iPhone 13 series. Apple never publicly states how much RAM it uses in its phones, but fortunately this information was found within the Xcode 13 beta by MacRumors.
String within Xcode revealed that just like the iPhone 12 series, the base iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini use 4GB RAM, while the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max use 6GB RAM. These are fairly small amounts of memory compared to the common 12GB RAM modules found in Android flagships. But as the benchmarks show, Apple clearly doesn't need the RAM to provide screaming performance.
The iPhone 13 range goes up for pre-orders tomorrow — check out our best iPhone 13 pre-order deals — with the phones hitting store shelves on Friday September 24. We've yet to reach a verdict on the range of four phones, but chances are they're going to earn a place on our best phones list based on how much we loved the iPhone 12 line. That's unless the Google Pixel 6 comes along and manages mix things up.
