At a glance, the iPhone 13’s new A15 processor doesn’t bringing much new to the table. That is, until you add the iPhone 13 Pro’s extra GPU core.
We benchmarked the new iPhone 13 models as part of our ongoing iPhone 13 review, and while the A15 is definitely the fastest mobile chip on the market right now, it doesn’t show the sort of performance jumps we saw between earlier versions of iPhones.
First, though, the bragging rights. Apple wants to make it very clear that the A15 is faster than its “leading competitor,” which means the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 in the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, and it is.
On the Geekbench benchmark, the A15 gets a shocking 46% higher multicore score than the S21 Ultra does. On Basemark Web, a web browsing benchmark, Safari on the iPhone 13 Pro gets nearly double the score Chrome on the Galaxy S21 Ultra does. Using the GFXBench Aztec Ruins gaming benchmark, which tests GPU, the 13 Pro gets more than double the frame rate of the Galaxy S21 Ultra.
This all goes to say, Apple’s silicon team is absolutely crushing Qualcomm (not to mention Mediatek) on basic measures of computing performance. Qualcomm recently shifted a lot of its marketing away from anything involving traditional CPU/GPU performance, to things like image signal processors, Snapdragon Sound, and RF front ends; you can see why here.
Apples vs. Apples
Apple’s A15 chip is based on the same 5nm process as the previous A14. Apple says it has all-new CPU cores, a new ISP, more cache, and a faster ML engine.
Apple might be crushing Qualcomm, but it’s plateaued a little in terms of its own performance this year. Looking at the iPhone XR (with the A12 processor) versus the iPhone 11 (A13), the iPhone 12 (A14), and the iPhone 13 (A15), you see consistent improvement between the first three phones, and then a real dip in improvement from the A14 to the A15.
Of course, Apple may have just focused intensely on power efficiency this year. While the A15 isn’t much faster than the A14, the iPhone 13 series has much better battery life than the iPhone 12 series.
The real shocker, for me, is the spike in speed improvement between the iPhone 13 and the 13 Pro specifically on GPU compute. The iPhone 13 Pro adds a fifth GPU core to the iPhone 13’s four, but there’s nothing about that which would, in my mind, create the 35% jump (!) in GPU benchmark performance I’ve been consistently seeing. I’m hoping some of the deeper-dive chipset folks like the crew at AnandTech can puzzle this one out.
What This Means for You
What does this all mean for you? Not a lot, honestly. iPhones have always run their apps very well, and very smoothly. If you’re upgrading from a much older iPhone, you’ll see much better performance here—that’s always been the case. If you’re thinking about upgrading from the iPhone 12, you won’t see much of a difference.
Apple says Cinematic Mode in the camera requires the A15, but I have to wonder if that’s an artificial limit—between the iPhone 12 and 13 especially, I don’t see the huge jump that would warrant it.
The additional GPU core in the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, I suspect, is mostly to make sure the 120Hz ProMotion display functions smoothly, and it does.
All in all, the processor improvements here are much less important for buyers than other factors such as battery life and 5G performance. But they’ll play into those elements of the iPhone experience, of course. Apple builds it all to work together.
