Apple A19 Pro and A19 performance review: Taking iPhone performance to the next level

Note: This feature was first published on 17 September 2025.

Apple unveils its new iPhones every September, and this year was no different. Like last year, the entire lineup gets new chips. But unlike last year, we have an all-new model called the iPhone Air.

The flagship iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max get the range-topping A19 Pro chip, while the super-thin iPhone Air also gets the A19 Pro chip (albeit a less powerful version). Finally, the iPhone 17 is powered by the A19 chip. As you’d expect, Apple says these new chips are more powerful and power-efficient. Unfortunately, Apple, as ever, is reluctant to share specific details about these chips. So, here’s what we know.

A19 Pro vs. A19: What’s the difference?

According to Apple, A19 Pro and A19 were built with “the most advanced 3nm technology” and come more memory and increased memory bandwidth. Popular benchmark app Geekbench identifies the A19 as having 8GB of memory, while the A19 Pro has 12GB of memory. Both chips still utilise 6-core CPUs, which consist of two performance cores and four efficiency cores.

Both chips also feature Apple’s “next-generation” GPU. The A19 features a 5-core GPU, while the A19 Pro is available in 5 and 6-core GPU variants. The iPhone Air’s A19 Pro chip has 5 GPU cores, while the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max’s A19 Pro chips come with 6 GPU cores. Also, it’s worth adding that the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have a more sophisticated thermal management system that uses vapour chamber cooling technology to keep their chips cool. Apple says this improves maximum sustained performance by up to 40%.

Apple says the A19’s GPU will deliver up to 20% faster graphics performance than the A18, and is up to 80% faster than the A16 Bionic. The A19 Pro’s GPU appears to be even more advanced. In the presentation, Apple states it features second-generation Dynamic Caching, increased 16-bit floating point math rate, and neural accelerators built into each GPU core. It claims that even the 5 GPU core version of the A19 Pro can deliver up to 3x the peak GPU compute of the A18 Pro, and that is “MacBook Pro levels of GPU compute in an iPhone”.

How do these improvements translate into numbers? Let’s take a look at the benchmarking results. To start, we’ve pitted all three versions of the A19 Pro and A19 against last year’s A18 Pro and A18. We’ve also included results from two of the best-performing Android phones in the market – the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and OPPO Find X8 Pro.

Also, we are highlighting results from Geekbench and 3DMark’s Solar Bay benchmarks to showcase CPU and GPU performance. Scroll all the way to the bottom to see the full suite of results and also how the new chips compare to older iPhones up to the iPhone 12 Pro Max and even iPad Pros.

Geekbench CPU results

3DMark Solar Bay results

As you can see from these numbers, the new A19 Pro and A19 chips are fast. The A19 Pro’s single-core CPU score was about 13% higher than the A18 Pro’s, while its multi-core CPU score was nearly 20% higher. Even the standard A19 was faster than the A18 Pro. Its single and multi-core CPU scores were roughly 5% and 10% higher.

On 3DMark’s Solar Bay test, the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro Max with 6 GPU cores was a staggering 43% faster than the A18 Pro in last year’s iPhone 16 Pro Max. It was also about 23% faster than the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air, which has one less GPU core. This significant discrepancy in results can be attributed to the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s more advanced cooling system.

What’s incredible is that if you look at the graphs at the end of the article, you’ll see that the results of the A19 Pro and A19 matches or surpasses that of the Apple M2 chip. Though the M2 chip is a little old by now (it made its debut in mid 2022), it’s still a “desktop-class” chip with 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores. Three years after its debut, we can now get the same level of performance in a smartphone chip.

Against its keenest Android rivals, the A19 Pro and A19’s single-core CPU performance was peerless. Even the slower A19’s single-core CPU performance was around 20% better than the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite 8 Gen 3 chip in the S25 Ultra, and a whopping 61% faster than the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chip in the OPPO Find 8X Pro. Multi-core scores weren’t bad too. It was nearly 3% better than the Qualcomm, and 22% higher than the MediakTek. The A19 Pro’s GPU performance was commendable, too. It was 12% faster than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 3, and edged out the Dimensity 9400 by just 2%.

The upshot of all these indigestible figures in this: these new chips are markedly more powerful than its predecessors and the competition. The A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max is presently the most powerful smartphone chip in the market, while the A19 isn’t too far behind and offers flagship-class levels of performance. Regardless of which phone you pick, you won’t be left wanting more performance.

That said, we’ll need more time with the phones to evaluate other aspects such as its displays, battery life, and camera systems. But what we can say for now is that its performance is class-leading.

Stay tuned for full reviews of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, the iPhone Air, and iPhone 17.

Apple A19 Pro & A19 full performance benchmark results