The A18 Pro powering the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max had already cemented its position as Apple’s fastest smartphone silicon to date by being 18 percent faster than last year’s A17 Pro in Geekbench 6’s Metal benchmark while also trading blows with the M1 in the single-core and multi-core department. In the latest GFXBench Aztec Ruins test, the newest SoC once again reaches a new performance plateau, but a closer look at the comparison reveals that it had to operate at a higher power draw to achieve this difference, resulting in a worse ‘performance per watt’ ratio.
In the new GFXBench Aztec Ruins benchmark, the A18 Pro shows to be consuming 11.5W, making it slightly higher than the A17 Pro’s power draw
While there were several benchmarks run by S. White Review on the video-uploading platform Bilibili, we wanted to focus on GFXBench Aztec Ruins, which stresses the GPU by running at the High Tier setting, which renders the benchmark at a 1440p resolution. Looking at the results, the A18 Pro obtains a framerate of 72FPS, making it 16 percent faster than the A18, which achieved 62FPS, and obtaining a 13 percent lead over the A17 Pro that was featured in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max and secured a 64FPS framerate.
The performance variation between a single generation is decent, but as we peel the onion to see what lies underneath, we get to know more about how the A18 Pro achieved these results. One of the graphs shows that the chipset was operating at 11.5W, which is higher than the A17 Pro’s power draw of 9.72W. In fact, the interesting bit here is that the A18 Pro has a worse ‘performance per watt’ ratio than its predecessor, which is puzzling to see because Apple’s latest SoC is mass produced on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process.
Using basic division, we divided the framerate with the power consumption to view the ‘performance per watt’ metric. It is possible that Apple is letting the A18 Pro run at full tilt to obtain a higher score but at the expense of increased power consumption. It may also be that the improved thermal design of the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max has allowed the silicon to operate at an increased power limit.
It is important to remember that benchmarks like GFXBench are designed to test the limits of chipsets like the A18 Pro, so it is unlikely that we will witness such a power draw during regular use, but it is still an interesting metric to spot. This increased power consumption could hint that the A18 Pro will display the same attribute when running AAA games natively, with the plus side being that it will deliver better performance and thermals than the A17 Pro.
News Source: Bilibili
