How well will the iPhone 12 perform? The first tests with the Apple A14 Bionic processor

IPhone 12 models will be the first smartphones on the market equipped with a chipset developed on a 5nm architecture, for a higher density of transistors and lower power consumption than in the past. In theory, the Apple A14 Bionic processor should be more powerful than last year’s A13, and with low power consumption. However, the first device equipped with A14 will not be iPhone 12, but iPad Air 4, which, although not officially launched, already appears in the GeekBench database, and the results are encouraging.

The Apple A14 Bionic processor is the first 5nm on the market

Initially, the performance of the Apple A14 Bionic processor was worrying, with the first tests of what appeared at the time to be a prototype iPhone 12 Pro Max suggesting minor improvements. However, the first tests with the new iPad Air 4, the first tablet that uses the A14 Bionic chipset and also the first Apple product announced with it, show that Apple will continue to increase the performance of its mobile devices, as it did every year.

Already Apple 13 Bionic is in some cases more efficient to use than all other mobile chipsets, but loses in other tests to models such as Snapdragon 865 from Qualcomm. It seems that the Apple A14 Bionic will bring the top performance back to the “yard” of Apple.

The first performance test features an improved chipset in both single-core and multi-core use cases. The score of 1,583 points in singles and 4,198 in multiples, puts it significantly above last year’s model, which reached 1,329, respectively 3,468 points in the same test and even above the most powerful Android processor of the moment, which reaches 930 points in single-core and 3,495 in multi-core.

Even the new test suggests that the Apple A14 will be even more powerful than the next models of Qualcomm and Samsung chipsets. The first tests with them demonstrated scores of 4,250 and 4,090 points for the following Snapdragon and Exynos models in a Samsung S21 configuration.

The 20% performance contribution on the iPad Air 4 compared to the iPhone 11 is within expectations.