46 MACWORLD JUNE 2019
iOSCENTRAL APPLE’S A13 CHIParchitectural tweaks and perhaps better
peak clock speeds to increase CPU
performance. After all, the company’s
chips are already the fastest around, and it
won’t take much to hold on to
that crown.
Apple’s single-core CPU
performance gains have been
remarkably steady in recent
years. If the trend holds, we’ll be
looking at a Geekbench 4
single-core CPU score of around
5,200. That blows the doors off
any Android phone and even
most thin-and-light laptops.
Multi-core performance is
harder to predict. The trend
line is skewed by the fact that
multi-core performance took a
big leap from the A10 to the A11, due to a
design change that allowed all the low-
power and high-power cores to work
together at once. If Apple doesn’t add any
more cores, the multi-core
performance of the A13 will
land somewhere between
12,200 and 12,500, simply
because the individual cores
will get faster. If Apple adds a
third high-performance CPU
core, that number will leap to
somewhere around 15-16,000.GRAPHICS
PERFORMANCE
Graphics performance is
critical to Apple, and will be
especially important as itApple has industry-leading single-threaded performance.
That’s likely to continue.
Apple’s multi-core performance is already stellar; a modest
improvement is all that’s required to be the fastest phone
on the market.