iPhone 12 disappoints in Antutu, offers small gains in Geekbench
The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro have just appeared on both Antutu and Geekbench, both benchmarks which we rely on to gauge a device’s performance. While benchmark scores aren’t exactly indicative of real-world user experience, it does allow one to guesstimate it.
iPhone 12 Antutu Scores
Interestingly enough, the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro’s A14 Bionic chipset falls behind the Snapdragon 865 in Antutu. The iPhone 12 Pro is slightly faster than the iPhone 12, which is what you would expect from a device offering pro-level features. The advantage seems to come from the 6GB RAM that the iPhone 12 Pro offers, instead of the 4GB that the iPhone 12 packs.
With the iPhone 12 scoring 564 899 points and the iPhone 12 Pro scoring 572 133 points, even a POCO F2 Pro offers higher scores at less than half the price. Antutu does note that the Antutu scores for Android and iOS versions are not directly comparable, so do not take this at face value. A more apt comparison would probably be against the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which scores 518 980 points. The newer iPhone 12 Pro is a meagre 10% faster, while the iPhone 12 is just 8% faster. So anyone who’s already using the iPhone 11 Pro can probably just wait for the next-gen iPhones to roll around.
iPhone 12 Geekbench Scores
Meanwhile in Geekbench, the iPhone 12 Pro Max post a more appreciable improvements over the iPhone 11 Pro Max. Apple managed to pack in a pretty sweet 18% uplift in single-core performance, although multi-core performance only sees a tiny 8% improvement.
Considering that the A14 Bionic is listed in Geekbench to run at up to 2.99GHz, versus the A13 Bionic’s 2.66GHz, we can probably assume that most of the advantage comes from the ability to clock higher thanks to the efficiency gains afforded by the newer 5nm process, and thus the higher performance in single-core performance. As a result, multi-core performance which is most probably held back by the A14 Bionic’s power limit, doesn’t see much improvement at all.
Apple may also have decided to set a more conservative power limit for the A14 Bionic, given how the addition of a 5G modem should have increased the total power consumption of the system. With that said, Geekbench does list the L1 Instruction and L1 Data caches to have grown from 96KB and 48KB in the A13 Bionic to 128KB and 64KB in the A14 Bionic, which hints at a newer architecture in play.
Versus the current king of Android smartphones, the ROG Phone 3 scores a mere 984 points for the single-core test, and 3417 points for the multi-core test. Apple definitely still has a very clear lead when it comes down to CPU architecture.
Would you be getting an iPhone 12 series, or would you reconsider the iPhone 11 series after seeing these benchmark scores? Let us know in the comments!
Pokdepinion: Iterative upgrades are pretty much the name of the game in the smartphone industry. Perhaps we should stop seeing yearly releases soon?
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