Apple iPhone X A11 Bionic 6-Core CPU Crushes All Android Challengers In Benchmark Leak

Each generation of iPhone brings with it a custom system-on-chip (SoC) with an impressive amount of power, and Apple is keeping that tradition with the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X (pronounced iPhone 10). Each of those handsets sports a custom A11 Bionic processor with six cores of computing muscle—four high performance cores and two power efficiency cores. If early leaked benchmarks are any indication, the A11 Bionic is going to set some records.

The A11 Bionic is reportedly built on a 10-nanometer FinFET process. We suspect the two power efficiency cores will perform the bulk medial chores to maintain battery life, which Apple says will be 2 hours longer than the iPhone 7. But for heavy lifting, the chip is capable of not only firing up its four high performance cores, it can tap all six cores simultaneously. Combined with a burly GPU, the A11 Bionic looks like a fierce chip.


A set of Geekbench scores reinforces that notion. Just prior to Apple announcing its newest iPhone models, Geekbench's database was updated with a new entry for an "iPhone 10,5" which we assume to be the iPhone X. In single-core performance, the phone scored 4,061 points, and nearly hit 10,000 points (9,959, to be exact) in multi-core performance, as seen above.

Those are spectacular scores. To put them into perspective, Samsung's Galaxy S8+ scored 1,845 points in single-core performance and 6,333 points in multi-core performance when we benchmarked the handset. Both phones are powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 SoC.

Here is a look at how other phones have fared in Geekbench, versus these new iPhone X-powered scores:

That's what you call a beat-down...

The iPhone X is top-tier device with some advanced features, such as Face ID (facial recognition) and augmented reality capabilities. Apple needed to use a burly chip to power the phone's capabilities, and while a single leaked benchmark is hardly a definitive sample size, it appears the A11 Bionic will be up to the task.


That kind of performance will come at a cost, at least on the iPhone X. Apple's MSRP starts at $999 for the iPhone X with 64GB; the iPhone X with 256GB of storage runs $1,150. Those are hefty prices, though if comparing the iPhone X 256GB to the iPhone 7 256GB ($1,070), it's an $80 price hike for newer and faster hardware and an OLED display upgrade, if you are looking for a reason to justify making the jump.

The iPhone 8 will be a little softer on the wallet with a starting price of $699, and the iPhone 8 Plus starting at $799. Like the iPhone X, the iPhone 8 models are powered by the same A11 Bionic chip with a neural engine, embedded M11 motion co-processor, and 64-bit architecture.