“Android chips are in despair again.” That was one of the louder posts on X this week after the A20 Pro numbers leaked. The scores are genuinely good. The victory lap is premature, and here’s why.
The iPhone 18 Pro scored 4,719 single-core and 12,677 multi-core
Two handsets running Geekbench 6.7 under the identifiers iPhone19,2 and iPhone19,3. The Pro hit 4,719 and 12,677, while Pro Max listings have come in anywhere from 4,612 to 4,725 single-core and 11,819 to 12,575 multi-core. Both show a six-core CPU clocked at 4.93GHz, 12GB of RAM and iOS 27, which lands publicly on Monday 14 September. On AnTuTu the Pro Max posted 3,551,073 against 2,275,118 for last year’s 17 Pro Max.
That’s a bigger jump than Apple itself advertised
Against the A19 Pro, these results work out to roughly 21-23% faster single-core and 25-28% faster multi-core, where Apple’s own press material claims up to 20% on CPU. GPU side matches the marketing more closely, with Metal scores around 38-40% ahead of the A19 Pro’s six-core setup. All of it on a 2nm process, so the efficiency should improve alongside the speed.
Beating the M5 Max in single-core does not mean beating it
This is where the posts get carried away. Yes, the A20 Pro’s single-core score clears the M5 Max at around 4,337, but the M5 Max multi-core sits near 29,000 against the A20 Pro’s 12,677. One core being quick is not the same as a laptop chip’s worth of cores. Same caution applies to the desktop comparisons doing the rounds.
The Android comparison isn’t settled yet
MediaTek’s upcoming Dimensity 9600 has posted 4,139 single-core and 13,285 multi-core, which puts it behind on one and ahead on the other. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 results exist but sit on different Geekbench versions or look too low to trust. Both chips go official later this month, and prototype scores shift before retail units ship, so anyone declaring a winner right now is working from incomplete numbers.
