Apple's latest A18 (non-Pro) application processor for smartphones not only challenges AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X and Apple's M4 in single-thread workloads in Geekbench 6, but it seemingly beats all previous-generation flagship CPUs for desktops and laptops. But when it comes to multi-thread, the limited amount of cores certainly makes an impact on performance.
Apple's vanilla A18 processor packs two high-performance cores operating at up to 4.0 GHz (the first time the company's smartphone processor hits such a high frequency) and four low-power cores. The new A18 system-on-chip (SoC) scores 3409 points in a Geekbench 6 single-thread benchmark and 8492 points in Geekbench 6 multi-thread benchmarks, both are very good results. In fact, they are 15.5% higher for single-thread performance and 16.6% higher for multi-thread performance when compared to its direct predecessor, the A16 Pro. The new chip is also tangibly faster than Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, at least on this one test.
