New Benchmarks Show iPhone 11 Is the Fastest Smartphone on the Market
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Apple says its A13 Bionic is the fastest smartphone chip on the market. Now, early benchmark testing appears to be backing up that claim.
The alleged Geekbench 4 scores, which were published yesterday, show significant improvement over past models and Android competitors. But they also add a fair bit of confusion to the RAM situation on the 2019 iPhone lineup. Here’s what you need to know.
iPhone 11 Pro Geekbench Results
The alleged 2019 iPhone device clocked in with a single-core Geekbench 4 score of 5,472 and a multi-core score of 13,769. That represents a marked improvement over the iPhone XS models of 2018.
Last year’s iPhone XS scored an average of 4,813 and 10,266 in single-core and multi-core testing, respectively.
For an Android comparison, take the recent Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ equipped with the latest Snapdragon 855 chip. That specific device scored a 3,467 in single-core and a 10,633 in multi-core using the Geekbench 4 benchmarks.
Apple’s A13 Bionic chipset is, in fact, the fastest smartphone chip currently on the market. As Apple noted during its September keynote, it’s also the fastest GPU in a smartphone, too.
When it comes to what specific device this is, it’s worth noting that iPhone 12,3 directly correlates with the 5.8-inch iPhone 11 Pro. That does add a bit of confusion to the situation, since the listing claims that the iPhone 11 Pro has 4GB of RAM (but we’ll get to that in a bit).
Keep in mind that Geekbench testing can be faked pretty easily. More than that, it’s sometimes unclear whether an iPhone’s high-efficiency or high-performance cores are being tested. That can result in subpar performance on paper.
How Much RAM Do the iPhone 11 Models Have?
As mentioned earlier, the Geekbench 4 listing is apparently an iPhone 12,3 — in other words the 5.8-inch iPhone 11 Pro. It apparently has 4GB of RAM.
That would make sense, since Apple doesn’t typically outfit its devices with a ton of memory. (Though iOS devices can always do a lot more than Android devices with less RAM.)
The confusing part are two separate reports from reliable leakers Steven Hemmerstoffer (@OnLeaks) and Ben Geskin. Both leakers claim that the iPhone 11 Pro models would have 6GB of RAM, citing Chinese supply chain sources.
(Those two leaks also reveal the battery capacities for this year’s iPhone lineup. In short, they all have larger batteries compared to last year’s models.)
So what’s going on? OnLeaks and Geskin have a solid track record. While they may both have received inaccurate information, it’s more likely that a Geekbench score was faked. It’s also possible that 6GB of RAM is reserved for higher storage tiers, like the 512GB variants. We’ve seen something similar on the iPad Pro lineup, since only the 1TB models have 6GB of RAM instead of the usual 4GB.
Of course, it’s still early on in the 2019 iPhone life cycle, so additional testing results and leaks will undoubtedly reveal all down the road. And in any case, this year’s iPhone lineup is likely to be incredibly speedy whether they have 4 or 6GB of memory.
