The chipset of the iPhone 16 Pro sounds increasingly disappointing

By James On Mar 12, 2024

At this point, it’s pretty much expected that the new chipset that Apple launches with its latest phones will be better than the best Android alternative, but for the first time in a long time, that might not be the case this year.

According to Nguyen Phi Hung post to X (via Telephone Arena), the A18 Pro that we expect to power the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max (and possibly the rest of the iPhone 16 line) will only be 10% faster than the A17 Pro that powers the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 will power ProMax.

That doesn’t sound like a particularly huge boost, and while we should take this claim with a grain of salt (especially since this is a new leak that doesn’t have much experience yet), it is in line with another recent leak.

We recently heard that the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset (which is expected to power many of next year’s top Android phones, like the Samsung Galaxy S25) could be more powerful than the A18 Pro. According to that report, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 can achieve a single-core Geekbench result of around 3,500, compared to around 3,300 for the A18 Pro.

However, there are some important caveats to keep in mind. For starters, the Snapdragon’s Geekbench result was apparently achieved at a clock speed of 4.3GHz, which would likely require greater power consumption than is achievable on a smartphone. So we are skeptical that the chipset will actually be capable of this.

A major upgrade in at least one respect

And leaving aside the question of whether the A18 Pro is more powerful than the Snapdragon or not, and whether it’s a big upgrade over the A17 Pro in terms of sheer power, it could at least get a big AI boost.

We’ve previously heard that the A18 Pro may have many more cores in its Neural Engine (dedicated to AI and machine learning tasks) than the A17 Pro.

So even if it isn’t significantly faster when running games and the like, the A18 Pro could at least be capable of performing several AI tasks that aren’t available on current iPhones.

Still, devices like the Google Pixel 8 and the Samsung Galaxy S24 already have significant AI capabilities, so Apple is catching up on that front. If it doesn’t exceed what Samsung and Google have already achieved here, and can’t match the next big Snapdragon chipset in terms of power, then the A18 Pro could be a real disappointment.

Since the iPhone 16 line won’t be released until September, it’s still early days for leaks. Hopefully we’ll hear much more promising news about the chipset powering these phones in the coming months.