The A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro - single-core faster than a desktop Ryzen and a Core i9

"A phone faster than a desktop" would have sounded like a joke a few years ago. Today it is a result in the Geekbench database. An entry labeled iPhone19,2, which is the iPhone 18 Pro, uploaded on September 10, shows 4,006 points in the single-core test and 11,460 across all six cores. Tom's Hardware lined it up against desktop processors on September 12, and the Apple chip came out 26 percent ahead of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 32 percent ahead of the Core i9-14900KS in the single-core test. It also beats its own siblings: the M5 from MacBooks by 7 percent and last year's A19 Pro by 23 percent.

Where does this jump come from? Apple moved two "supercores" from its M-series chips into the phone, pushed them from 4.26 to 4.93 GHz and had the whole thing built by TSMC on a 2 nm process, the first in an iPhone. On top of that, 50 percent more memory bandwidth. For comparison: when the A17 Pro became the first to move to 3 nm back in 2023, it gained just under 10 percent. Now it is 23 percent, the biggest generational leap in years.

So what does it mean in practice? A single core is what you feel under your finger: opening a page, scrolling a gallery, compiling code (in the Clang test the iPhone scored 4,663 points against 2,379 for a laptop Core Ultra X9). Multi-core performance is for video rendering and long computations, and there the 16-core Ryzen has 30,428 points and beats the iPhone by a factor of 2.7. The phone also has no fan: a benchmark takes a moment, while a desktop holds the pace for hours. Notebookcheck put it plainly: the smartphone SoC "only holds an advantage in peak burst performance, however, and is utterly dominated under sustained workloads and on the GPU side." Apple's answer is a vapor chamber three times larger and a promise of 40 percent better sustained performance than the iPhone 17 Pro. Whether it keeps that promise is for the reviews to show.

One caveat: this is a single pre-launch result, uploaded from a unit nobody has independently checked. Geekbench 7 only came out in July and scores differently than version 6 (the same iPhone gets 4,719 there), so comparisons only hold within one version. The database clearly does not know the new chip yet, because in the processor name field it lists "Intel Pentium II/III."

In the U.S., pre-orders for the iPhone 18 Pro opened on Saturday, September 12, with phones in stores from September 18. The same chip goes into the folding iPhone Duo: pre-orders from October 16, in stores from October 23.

Geekbench - a benchmark that measures processor speed in short tests; version 7 came out in July 2026 and scores differently than version 6. Single-core and multi-core - tests of one core and of all cores at once; the first reflects everyday responsiveness, the second corresponds to rendering and long computations. Vapor chamber - a flat heat pipe that spreads heat away from the chip.