‘Lower clocked Apple A17 Pro cores are far ahead of the competition, GPU is not’

YouTube channel Geekerwan has put its analysis of the Apple A17 Pro-soc online. The more economical CPU cores on the SoC in particular perform impressively, says Geekerwan. The GPU, on the other hand, makes less of an impression.

The performance cores of the A17 Pro boost to 3.78GHz, allowing the SoC to outperform its predecessors and the competition in the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark, but at a higher power consumption, Geekerwan reports. The more efficient cores run at 2.11GHz, offering approximately the performance of Arm Cortex A710 cores with the power consumption of A510 cores. This means that the power consumption for the same performance is less than half that of, for example, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

With the GPU, Apple seems to have only focused on MetalFX upscaling and ray tracing, because the performance itself is at the level of the MediaTek Dimensity 9200+, but below the level of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. In GFXBench 5.0 at the Aztec Ruins 1440P test, the A17 Pro requires more than 11W, while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 requires around 7W for the same performance.

In terms of cooling, the iPhone 15 models are still able to dissipate less heat than some Android competitors, especially since Apple seems to pay relatively little attention to this. As a result, throttling remains a recurring phenomenon with iPhones, Geekerwan concludes. The Neural Engine performs better in a Stable Diffusion test than its predecessors, but does so at a higher power consumption. Geekerwan has built a reputation for deep analyzes of mobile SoCs in recent years. The A17 Pro soc is in the iPhone 15 Pro phones, which were released last Friday.