iPhone 7 Series is Faster Than Any MacBook Air Ever Made

Thursday September 15, 2016 3:57 AM PDT by Tim Hardwick
Yesterday, John Gruber at Daring Fireball highlighted just how well Apple's A10 Fusion chip found in its iPhone 7 stands up to the competition in terms of raw speed.

iphone-7-geekbench-scores
(Image taken from Daring Fireball.)

Looking at Geekbench results for single and multi-core performance across a range of smartphones, Gruber noted that the iPhone 7 series beats all newcomers on every score, including Samsung's new Galaxy S7 and Note 7 Android phones.

More impressively perhaps, the A10 Fusion processor scores faster overall results than every MacBook Air Apple has ever made, only once falling behind a multi-core score recorded for the early 2015 MacBook Air, which is powered by an Intel Core i7 and scores 5650, just edging the iPhone 7's result of 5630. Still, the laptop can't keep up with the A10 chip's raw single-core performance (2989 compared to 3261). Apple's latest flagship phone also performs comparably to an early 2013 MacBook Pro, powered by an Intel Core i5.

Apple has invested heavily in its Ax-series of processors, with some commentators and rumors suggesting it could eventually transition an ARM-based processor to future MacBooks. You can learn more about the technology behind Apple's A10 Fusion chip in MacRumors' dedicated article on the subject.

Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tag: A10 Fusion
Buyer's Guide: iPhone 8 (Neutral)
111 comments


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bellang
21 months ago
"iPhone 7 Series is Faster Than Any MacBook Air Ever Made"
Except the really fast one...
Rating: 25 Votes
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neuropsychguy
21 months ago
The headline isn't misleading. The 2015 Air with the dual core i7 is only faster than the iPhone 7 on the multicore benchmark by about 0.4% but is slower on the single core benchmark by about 8.3%.

That means the iPhone 7 is faster overall.

A benchmark is a severely restricted way of looking at performance but for Apple to offer that level of performance with such a low powered processor in the iPhone 7 is impressive.
Rating: 23 Votes
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macslayer118
21 months ago
Misleading title is misleading.
Rating: 21 Votes
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Ballis
21 months ago
So when will we be getting phones capable of running osx when docked to a keyboard and monitor?
Rating: 17 Votes
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SMIDG3T
21 months ago
Single-Core twice as fast as the exploding Note7. Love it.
Rating: 16 Votes
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JaySoul
21 months ago
That's more a commentary on the Macbook Air.
Rating: 15 Votes
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keysofanxiety
21 months ago

What's the point of all this as you're not going to use an iPhone like an Air and why would you ever try.


It's just to put things into perspective really. You've got a CPU that you can hold in your hand, in a phone, which doesn't require any cooling... and it practically spanks any dual-core mobile chip currently shipping in a laptop. An in-house, Apple designed chip. It's a stunning achievement.

If Apple could just crack the problem of the x86 instruction set, then we could have MacBooks shipping that utterly cream the competition. Apple designed CPU. Apple designed OS. Apple designed hardware. Apple chip pipeline.

That's what I'd call a 'proper' Mac. One that doesn't rely on Intel.
Rating: 15 Votes
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kamalds
21 months ago
Stupid test. Mac operating system and android phones can run things in background and run at much higher screen resolution, handle tons of other things that mobile centric-iOS does not have to deal - like inability to run applications in background like android and full blown Mac OS
Rating: 10 Votes
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H2SO4
21 months ago

Call me when it runs x64 applications

This. Give it a movie to process in Handbrake and we’ll really see how fast it is(n’t).
Rating: 10 Votes
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555gallardo
21 months ago
> Faster than my MacBook Air (2660 / 5017)
> Possibly placed in iPad Pro 2
> Still can't run Photoshop, Final Cut Pro or Parallels
Rating: 9 Votes
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