The A17 Bionic’s performance numbers allegedly revealed last week that Apple’s first 3nm SoC comfortably beat the A16 Bionic with a 43 percent mult-core lead. Unfortunately, the leak proved to be a forgery. However, if the leak is genuine, the SoC will only be slightly slower than the M2, which none of us are expecting to see.
Let’s start with the previous single-core and multi-core scores. The Apple A17 Bionic scored 3,986 and 8,841 points in both performance categories on Geekbench 6. Again, the credibility of these scores was called into question, but if this version of the A17 Bionic were to compete against Apple’s redesigned portable Mac, it would be only 7% slower.
The M2 MacBook Air achieves single-core and multi-core scores of 2,560 and 9,567 on the Geekbench 6 database, respectively. Given that the MacBook Air has four performance and four power-efficiency cores, for a total of eight cores, its multi-core result will always be higher than the A17 Bionic, which we expect to have two performance cores when it is officially announced.
The architecture difference may allow the real Apple A17 Bionic to achieve a higher single-core score, as the fake results show a whopping 55% performance difference when compared to the M2.
We discovered another alleged leak of Apple’s first 3nm chipset, and the results were a little more credible. The A17 Bionic achieved a single-core score of 3,019 and a multi-core score of 7,860, which is 11% slower than the first leak.
Even if the latest leak is true, there will be a larger multi-core performance gap between the A17 Bionic and M2, demonstrating that a significant difference will continue to exist in smartphone and laptop chipsets. That was to be expected, given that they are designed for different purposes.
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