Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max come with Apple’s latest mobile chip: the A20 Pro. The foldable iPhone Duo will also run on the new chip.
Built on a 2nm process, the A20 Pro has a 6-core CPU with two super cores and four efficiency cores, a 7-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine that handles AI tasks.
But does any of that techspeak translate into actual performance?
To find out, we put the iPhone 18 Pro (the Pro Max yields near-identical results) to the test. And yes, in synthetic benchmark tests, this thing blows everything else out of the water. The latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset in the Galaxy S26 Ultra, is the only one that comes close. To make sure I’m testing it right, I’ve run the Geekbench 6 and 7 tests on a perfectly clean, freshly activated iPhone 18 Pro with no third-party apps installed and nothing running in the background.
The A20 Pro proves Apple silicon is undefeated
In Geekbench 7’s CPU test (the standard benchmark we use when reviewing laptops and smartphones), the iPhone 18 Pro achieved a 3,959 single-core score and a 10,854 multi-core score. And in the Geekbench 7 GPU test, it scored 61,194.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
We also ran Geekbench 6, an earlier version of this benchmarking tool, as the scores are easier to compare with older devices. The results here were even more impressive. The iPhone 18 Pro scored 4,673 in the single-core CPU test and 12,483 in the multi-core Geekbench 6 test.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
For comparison, here are how some other recent flagship phones performed on Geekbench 6 in our testing:
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Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra: 3,524 single-core, 10,827 multi-core
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Google’s Pixel 11 Pro XL: 1,800 single-core, 5,000 multi-core
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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra: 3,097 single-core, 10,277 multi-core
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Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max: 3,779 single-core, 9,778 multi-core
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Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: 2,800 single-core, 9,100 multi-core (we’ve gotten results as high as 10,049)
You get the idea: These phones are nowhere near Apple’s new silicon, at least when it comes to synthetic test performance. (Transitioning Apple to its own in-house processors was one of John Ternus’s biggest achievements before he was promoted to CEO.)
The performance improvement versus the iPhone 17 Pro Max is hardly surprising, but it’s still notable that the iPhone 18 Pro beats its predecessor by roughly 25 percent across the board.
Will you feel the difference in real-world usage? Yes and no.
The new phones are undeniably faster than anything else out there. But, as noted in my iPhone 18 Pro review, it’s not all that noticeable unless you’re switching from a much older device. The thing is, Apple’s iPhones have been incredibly fast and powerful for a while, so the fact that the latest phone is that much faster than the previous one is just icing on the cake. Unless you’re an AI superuser, it’s unlikely you’ll push the new iPhones to the limit.
One last note: The iPhone Duo is also running the A20 Pro chip, and we’re eager to see whether it scores higher or lower than the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. It’s the same chip, yeah, but the rest of the device is different enough, starting with that enormous foldable display, for us to be intrigued about the Duo’s scores. We’ll have more on that once the iPhone Duo is in our hands next month.
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