We got our first glimpse at the A14 processor Apple plans to use in this fall’s iPhone 12 models this week, when the company showed off the iPad Air 4 that’s powered by the new chip. And while Apple was happy to talk about the performance gains the A14 delivers over iPads powered by the A12 Bionic processor, we still don’t know how the A14 compares to last year’s A13 Bionic chip.
Leaked benchmarks from Antutu, purportedly showing off an iPhone 12 Pro Max’s performance, may help fill in some of the blanks. MySmartPrice spotted the leaked numbers, which claim to show off a device with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage running iOS 14.1.
According to the leaks, the iPhone 12 Pro Max tallied a score of 572,333 on Antutu’s test, which is a 9% gain over the iPhone 11 Pro Max’s 524,436 result on the same test. MySmartPrice says the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s reported tally would be the highest score ever posted by an iPhone, which you’d hope given that it’s a new model.
When the iPad Air 4 debuted this week, Apple promised a 40% CPU improvement over the A12 Bionic along with a 30% graphics boost. The gains are more modest when compared to the A13 Bionic, at least based on the leaked Antutu results. The CPU score for the iPhone 12 Pro Max was 17% higher than the iPhone 11 Pro Max’s, while graphics are 4% better.
In its report on the Antutu results, GSMArena speculates that Apple could prioritize battery draw over performance with the A14, which could explain the modest increases in CPU and GPU results. It’s also possible that this is a pre-production model that has yet to be optimized for final release.
GSMArena notes that the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s reported Antutu resort is shy of what it’s seen from Snapdragon 865 Plus-powered phones, but adds that Antutu isn’t the best benchmark for comparing cross-platform results — something Antutu itself acknowledges.
The A14 Bionic is a 5-nanometer chipset, which should boost performance and power efficiency over 7-nanometer processors like the A12 and A13. We should find out specifically what kind of performance gains to expect once Apple unveils the iPhone 12 — that’s likely to happen next month.
