Apple’s A18 delivers solid performance gains, challenges Ryzen 9 9950X in single-core Geekbench | Tom’s Hardware

Apple’s latest A18 (non-Pro) application processor for smartphones not only challenges AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X and Apple’s M4 in single-thread workloads in Geekbench 6, but it seemingly beats all previous-generation flagship CPUs for desktops and laptops. But when it comes to multi-thread, the limited amount of cores certainly makes an impact on performance. 

Apple’s vanilla A18 processor packs two high-performance cores operating at up to 4.0 GHz (the first time the company’s smartphone processor hits such a high frequency) and four low-power cores. The new A18 system-on-chip (SoC) scores 3409 points in a Geekbench 6 single-thread benchmark and 8492 points in Geekbench 6 multi-thread benchmarks, both are very good results. In fact, they are 15.5% higher for single-thread performance and 16.6% higher for multi-thread performance when compared to its direct predecessor, the A16 Pro. The new chip is also tangibly faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, at least on this one test.

When compared to PC-grade processors, A18 looks pretty good too. It beats Apple’s M3, AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X, and Intel’s Core i9-14900KS processors in the single-thread Geekbench 6 benchmark. It also challenges AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X, but falls behind Apple’s own M4 (which has 400 MHz higher clocks) both CPUs have considerably higher power budgets. As you might expect, then it comes to multi-thread performance, A18 with its six cores falls significantly behind PC-grade processors. Hence, the intrigue is whether the eight-core A18 Pro can challenge Apple’s M3.

Keeping in mind that the A18’s frequency increase, when compared to its predecessor is 6%, the majority of single-thread and multi-thread performance improvements should be attributed to microarchitectural enhancements.  

While the performance increases look modest, this isn’t particularly surprising as Apple’s A18 is made on TSMC’s N3E (3nm-class) process technology that was architected to reduce costs compared to N3B (3nm-class), at the cost of transistor density rather than to tangibly increase performance or lower power consumption (even though N3E enables a bit higher clocks and reduces power compared to N3B). In other words, Apple had a limited transistor budget to add here. 

One thing to keep in mind about Geekbench 6 results is that we are dealing with a synthetic benchmark, and the real-world performance of Apple’s A18 and A18 Pro will be different. Nonetheless, Geekbench 6 results seemingly demonstrate that Apple’s own performance estimates are accurate (who said they are not based on Geekbench 6 though?) and that the company’s new processors can offer about 15% performance improvements over the A17 Pro in best-case scenarios. 

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.