Year after year after year, Apple’s iPhone has always had the most powerful chip in any
smartphone, and that’s something we can expect Apple to brag about at every iPhone
event.
And in the past couple of years, Apple’s chips have gotten so good that the latest
Android phones like the Pixel 6 Pro are being beaten out by two-year-old iPhones like the
iPhone 11 in various tests, which is absolutely ridiculous!
And the lead gets even crazier when comparing graphics performance, with the 13 Pro being
almost twice as fast!
But within the last couple of weeks, some new challengers in the smartphone chip game
have emerged, namely the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and the Mediatek 9000, which are taking
the tech world by storm!
So in this video, I’m gonna talk about why Apple should be worried about these two new
chips, because if they don’t act fast and fix the current BIGGEST problem with the iPhone’s
chip design, then the iPhone 14 Pro is gonna be in huge trouble.
So before I get into those new chips and how truly impressive they are, let’s talk about
that major problem!
With last years’ iPhone 12 Pro, we noticed major overheating issues, especially while
gaming, which would cause the display to dim like crazy in games like Genshin Impact, and
it would even cause the FPS to drop, which signals severe thermal throttling.
And we even had these major issues while not playing games, like when Max was trying to
operate his drone outside, causing display dimming so bad that Max crashed his drone
because he couldn’t see what was going on!
And thankfully, this year, it got a lot better, like in this hands-on comparison where we
ran some benchmarks, showing just how bad the dimming was on the iPhone 12 lineup.
And because of that, the same exact A14 chip from the iPhone 12 was actually 6% faster
in terms of multi-core performance when inside the iPad Air 4, which can only be explained
by Apple capping the performance so it won’t overheat!
But wait.. It got even worse in terms of graphics performance because the iPad Air 4 was an
absolutely insane 37% faster than the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and yes, that’s with the SAME
A14 chip!
Now thankfully, the new A15 chip in the iPhone 13 lineup handles heat a LOT better, and in
my experience, the display no longer dims in a lot of the common games I tested like
Call of duty mobile, League of legends wild rift, and pokemon unite.
However, I recently made a video where I played Genshin Impact and Pascal’s wager with 120FPS
mode turned on to take advantage of the new 120hz ProMotion feature on the new iPhone
13 Pro.
And the issue I found was that the display still dimmed just after 10 minutes in Genshin
Impact, and it dimmed twice in Pascal’s wager, getting extremely dark from overheating!
And the worst part of all was that the iPhone’s software was doing something weird where it
would jump back and forth between 120FPS and 60FPS without allowing anything in between,
which was very annoying.
So what I did was test Razer’s new MagSafe phone cooler to cool the back on the iPhone
and it worked like a DREAM, with absolutely zero display dimming in either of the games…
and after a 10 minute run of Pascal’s wager, the hottest spot on the iPhone was just 37
degrees Celsius compared to 44 degrees without the phone cooler…
And when we compared the final results, our average FPS rose by 10% when using the cooler,
which basically proves that the new A15 chip is being held back by overheating issues.
And if you’re wondering just how much it’s being held back by, it’s actually a lot!
The A14 chip within the iPad Air 4 scores as much as 12,488 points in Geekbench 5’s
metal test, which is actually quite a bit faster than the 4-core version of the new
A15 chip in the iPhone 13, which honestly should never happen, but it does because of
thermal throttling.
It’s only the 5-core GPU version of the A15 within the 13 Pro that beats out the iPad
Air, but only by around 15%.
But the disappointing thing is that if you just added another core to the A14 chip within
the iPad Air to match the 5 cores on the A15, it would actually outperform it by a huge
margin.
So the point that I’m trying to make is that the #1 thing that’s holding back the
performance of Apple’s iPhone chips is overheating and thermal throttling.
And meanwhile, a lot of Android phones like the Galaxy S21 Ultra are already implementing
vapor chamber cooling systems that greatly help control the thermals, and that’s why
the back remained cool and the display didn’t dim at all while playing Genshin Impact.
So with all of that said, Apple absolutely NEEDS some sort of a vapor chamber cooling
system inside of the iPhone 14 Pro or they’re gonna hit a performance WALL and get overrun
by the competition.. And let me tell you, these recent benchmarks from the new Snapdragon
8 gen 1 and the Mediatek 9000 should make Apple worried, so let’s jump right into
that.
While that new Snapdragon chip isn’t coming anywhere close to Apple in terms of CPU benchmark
scores, the graphics side of the chip is incredible!
According to a new benchmark testing video by TechNick on YouTube, the new chip was actually
able to outperform the A15 in 3DMark’s Wild Life benchmark, which is mind-blowing because
the iPhone was already almost twice as fast as the competition.
So I looked up some more tests online and to my surprise, the new Snapdragon 8 gen 1
was almost neck and neck with the new iPhone 13 Pro, which is something that hasn’t happened
in years because as you can see, even the iPhone 12 is beating out all of the other
Android phones.
And it just sucks to know that the only reason the iPhone lost in that 3DMark benchmark is
because of the thermal throttling issues that are limiting performance, so Apple could easily
fall behind unless they fix these issues!
But making things worse, the new MediaTek 9000 chip got a huge improvement in terms
of multi-core CPU performance, now outperforming every other Android phone chip on the market
including the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip.
But when we compare it to the iPhone, the new MediaTek is the first chip to beat out
the iPhone 12 lineup, and it’s just inches away from the performance of the iPhone 13
mini which is slower than the Pro because the smaller chassis has even more thermal
throttling issues than the larger 13 Pro.
So it’s kind of crazy to think that Mediatek, a company known for making low-end chips,
just came out with their first iteration of a true flagship chip.. And it’s almost neck
and neck with Apple’s new A15 chip within the iPhone 13 mini.. And it’s all because
Apple is struggling to keep the chip cool..
Now, of course, Apple’s A16 chip next year will further their performance lead in both
CPU and GPU tests, but if they can’t figure out a great cooling solution to stop these
overheating issues, then there’s a chance that for the first time in MANY MANY years,
they could actually fall behind their competitors who are already implementing vapor chamber
cooling systems.
So hopefully you learned something new from this video, and if you disagree with any of
my thoughts, go ahead and comment below, but if you enjoyed it, click that circle above
to subscribe for more videos like this one! Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in
the next one!