Benchmarks say iPhone Pro 13 is the world’s fastest phone

iPhone 13 Pro slide

I feel like its safe to reject the nonsense reports that claimed Apple didn’t share too many A15 chip benchmarks  during its iPhone 13 launch because its processor design team is in trouble following some lost employees.

AnTuTu’s published benchmarks show it’s still the best and fastest smartphone money can buy.

Benchmarking the iPhone 13 Pro

AnTuTu’s benchmarks for the iPhone 13 Pro show its tests of the 1TB model, which carries 6GB RAM. Published on Weibo, the numbers claim 839,675 points overall, which is 133,950 higher than achieved by the iPhone 12 Pro and he A14 Bionic chip.

Which means the new iPhone is around 18.9% faster than its predecessor, along with much better graphics and longer battery life. In part this is because of improvements in the memory. The data shows a 16.9% faster CPU and 18.8% faster GPU.

What this means is that the iPhone 13 Pro is now the third fastest device on the AnTuTu iOS leaderboard, just behind the current M1-powered iPad Pro tablets.

Now, I can’t say this means the iPhone 13 Pro series is racking up to be the fastest smartphone in the world. Nor can I definitively claim Apple’s not a little stressed out at any churn in its processor design teams, but given the evidence it seems like:

1. Given M1 iPad Pros are almost as fast as its M1 Macs, Apple’s iPhone is almost as fast as a Mac. That probably means iPhone 13 Pro is the fastest smartphone in the world.
2. Apple may have shed some staff, but the project it is working on now will be focused in a broad sense in overall chip design for the next few years, with some of the team focused on next year’s processor. So things will probably be fine.

Geekbench scores are also emerging

Geekbench scores are also emerging. At present these suggest an average single-core score of 1730, and an average multi-core score of 4621, roughly 10% and 21% increase respectively compared to the iPhone 12’s score in the same tests.

Covering this same data, MacRumors Julie Clover said:

“The iPhone 13 Pro, or iPhone14,2, earned a Metal score of 14216, a 55 percent increase compared to the 9123 Metal score earned by the iPhone 12 Pro

“Apple has called the A15 chip with the 5-core GPU in the Pro models the “world’s fastest smartphone chip,” and says that it delivers “up to 50% faster graphics performance than any other smartphone chip.” Given the difference demonstrated in Metal scores, that appears to be accurate, with the A15 in the Pro models outperforming the A14.”

Later reports seemingly confirmed this.

Facts v. FUD

There are some people making arguments against this data, but it really doesn’t matter.

As the information rolls in it’s becoming increasingly clear that the iPhone 13 Pro delivers more performance than before but eats less battery life.

To me, it feels as if Apple, knowing it already had chips far more advanced than anyone else can deliver at its kind of scale, chose to focus its A15 effort on graphics performance and battery life rather than process boosts. And still made a phone that’s faster than the previously available fastest smartphone money could buy, which was also an iPhone. At least, until next year.

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