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A Lot of Geekbench Scores of Completely Arbitrary Devices (because I wanted to)

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 3 min read

Sometimes you just have to make some graphs.

This is going to be a pretty simple post, as my wife got a new laptop this month and I wanted to see how it and some of the other devices around the house. If nothing else, this gives you an idea of how far we’ve come, and how amazing the chips are in the phones we carry around in our pockets.

The Devices

  1. Dell XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 (10th Gen Intel Core i7-1065G7)
  2. MacBook 2016 (1.1 GHz dual-core Intel Core m3-6Y30)
  3. iPad Pro 2018 (A12X)
  4. iPhone 11 Pro (A13)
  5. Pixel 4 (Snapdragon 855)
  6. Mac Mini 2012 (2.5 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5)

Obviously, these devices span 7 years and have wildly different prices, so this is more a curiosity than a “who will win!?” head-to-head.

Geekbench Single Core

The latest iPhone gets the best single core score here, but the Dell XPS laptop with a 10th gen i7 is right there, as is the iPad Pro from 18 months ago.

Geekbench Multi-Core

Things change a bit when we switch to mili-core performance. The XPS edges out the iPad Pro by 0.2%, which is basically a tie, and the iPhone 11 Pro drops down to a distant third. Meanwhile, the Pixel 4 separates itself a bit from the MacBook and aging Mac Mini, both of which are far and away the slowest.

Geekbench Compute

And finally we have the compute test which test graphics performance, and in this case the iPad Pro shot up to 13% faster than the XPS, and the iPhone 11 Pro maintained a similar lag compared to the two laptop-class devices. The 8 year old Mac Mini also fell off a cliff here, to the point where I wondered if it would even finish the test at a certain point.

Price Per Point

This is far from a perfect measure and it does not indicate the intrinsic value of each device, but I thought it was interesting to compare the price of each device and calculate how many points of multi-core performance you get from each device.

By this imperfect measure, the MacBook was far and away the worst value and the iPad Pro was the best.

But of course, this all depends on the measure you use. Here’s the same chart based on the single core performance:

Now the iPhone is the winner.

And just to complete the set, here’s the price precompute point:

I think the one thing this tells us for sure is that no matter how you slice it, the 2018 iPad Pro is a great deal and is a little powerhouse 😉