On the benchmark note, keep in mind that this test depends greatly on GPU performance also whereas geekbench is testing the CPU. Snapdragon has been doing a fantastic job on the GPU front.
Interesting results. Wonder how much would change after further software updates on the iphone. 15 pro seems to have had a poor optimization. If they had taken this video a week or so ago, it would have been considerably worse.
This might be a limitation of their overall chip design. It's meant to have a lot more power, but also to throttle more quickly. The A17 does this to a greater extent than the A16 (see RE: Village performance).
Apple claims the heat issues with the 15 Pro stem from poorly optimized code and will be resolved through OS and third-party app updates. But if the thermal engineering truly is the culprit, then they are dealing with a fundamental hardware flaw.
And if addressing the heat issue is their goal, there is only so much they can do in terms of software optimization. Unless they get very lucky and strike gold in terms of finding and correcting poor code, they will likely need to make performance worse to achieve the desired result.