The iPhone 17 Pro surrendered its performance crown to the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but Apple just reclaimed the title by a healthy margin. Following yesterday's announcement of the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone Duo, the A20 Pro chip powering them showed up on the Geekbench benchmarking platform today.
The improvements pay off
The A20 Pro is a huge leap over the A19 Pro. It's based on the 2nm processing tech, meaning the transistors, or building blocks, are smaller and more tightly packed.
Apple claims the two new super cores or CPU processing units are 20% faster and touted desktop-class performance. Paired with other architecture upgrades, the iPhone 18 Pro promises up to 40% faster sustained performance on the iPhone 18 Pro than on the iPhone 17 Pro. Apple sure wasn't flexing empty numbers.
The A20 Pro has obliterated the competition. | Image by onghorn
The iPhone 18 Pro apparently scored 4,719 and 12,677 points on the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively.
The iPhone 17 Pro managed 3,668 and 9,498 points on the same test. For the Galaxy S6 Ultra, which is powered by the 3nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Elite, the scores sit at 3,753 and 11,259. While some might argue that the Galaxy S27 Ultra will close the gap when it transitions to a 2nm chip, that appears unlikely.
What do higher iPhone 18 Pro benchmarks mean for you?
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First to market, not first in class
The iPhone 18 Pro isn't the first handset to be underpinned by a 2nm chip. That distinction belongs to the Galaxy S26 and S26+, which run on the 2nm Exynos 2600. Yet despite having a head start with the 2nm tech, the Galaxy S26+ topped out at just 3,149 and 10,877.
The Exynos 2600 is also known to reach high temperatures, meaning it can maintain its peak performance for only a little while. Apple, on the other hand, thought everything through.
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Thermal management
Whether spooked by iPhone 15 Pro overheating complaints or just playing it safe, Apple began paying close attention to heat dissipation last year by equipping the iPhone 17 Pro with a vapor chamber. The company doubled down on it with more changes this year.
A new physical package houses the memory alongside the chip to remove it from the thermal path, connecting the chip directly to the new vapor chamber, which has three times the surface area of the one used in the iPhone 17 Pro. This allows it to spread heat over a much larger area.
Higher benchmark scores suggest the iPhone 18 Pro is faster at everyday tasks like launching apps and the camera, loading webpages, and running UI animations as well as demanding workloads such as gaming and photo processing.
With thermal management taken care of, the high performance will be sustained for longer periods.
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Anam Hamid is a computer scientist turned tech journalist who has a keen interest in the tech world, with a particular focus on smartphones and tablets. She has previously written for Android Headlines and has also been a ghostwriter for several tech and car publications. Anam is not a tech hoarder and believes in using her gadgets for as long as possible. She is concerned about smartphone addiction and its impact on future generations, but she also appreciates the convenience that phones have brought into our lives. Anam is excited about technological advancements like folding screens and under-display sensors, and she often wonders about the future of technology. She values the overall experience of a device more than its individual specs and admires companies that deliver durable, high-quality products. In her free time, Anam enjoys reading, scrolling through Reddit and Instagram, and occasionally refreshing her programming skills through tutorials.
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