- iPhone chip —DEAVATE HAS IMPROVED 385X Since 2007 -launching, according to Benchmarks
- A17 and A18 chips in iPhone 16 models continue Apple’s effective performance strand
- NEXT-GEN iPhone could push CPU performance over 500X Original iPhone Processor
A new study from PC Watch has compared the performance of Apple’s smartphone chips over time, and found that the iPhone CPU has improved by 384.9x since the original model launched in 2007.
The analysis used geekbonch data to track performance across generations, which estimated an average annual improvement rate of approx. 40%.
Based on this course, the next generation of the iPhone 17 Pro, expected later in 2025, could push this number past the 500X mark.
More performance -focused
The original iPhone that Steve Jobs launched back in 2007 was run by an Arm11-based SOC from Samsung. This chip had a nominal frequency of 620MHz, but it actually ran at only 412MHz.
For iPhone 3GS, released two years later, Apple went to a cortex-A8 core Samsung CPU (APL0298C05), which marked the beginning of more performance-focused chip design.
In 2013, the Apple iPhone 5S launched the first smartphone sent with a 64-bit processor, Apple A7 (Cyclone). The move pushed Apple in front of the rest of the mobile industry at the time.
Apple’s design philosophy has long focused on balancing power with efficiency. While Android chipmakers embraced eight- and ten-core designs, Apple has been stuck with six-core layouts since 2017, typically with two high performance kernels and four efficiency kernels.
Despite this, Apple consistently ranks on or near the top in both one-threaded and multi-core performance.
2024’s iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro continued this approach. The default models use the A17 Bionic Chip, built on a 3NM process and scored over 8100 on PC Watch‘s geekbench 6 test. The Pro models use the A18 Bionic, which achieved scores over 8500 and has core watch exceeding 4 GHz.
In comparison, the iPhone 13 Pro Max from 2021 scored approx. 5700 in the same benchmark. This means an improvement of 50% over three years.
The performance is increased by the different generations of iPhone from 2007 and in the future are clearly huge, but there are warnings for the method used for testing. It is important to note that the number includes estimated conversions to the older iPhones that took place modern benchmarks.
