It’s official: The iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max are here, and with them, Apple’s next-generation smartphone chips are here: the A18 and A18 Pro.
The new iPhone 16 series and the A18 series chipsets were unveiled during Apple’s ‘It’s Glowtime’ event on September 9.
You’ll find the A18 in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, and the A18 Pro in the recently expanded iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
Apple claims you’ll see a serious performance boost with these new chips, but as usual, hasn’t provided any concrete benchmarks. The company only cites percentage improvements over the previous generation.
For reference, when we say “previous generation,” we mean the A16 Bionic chip in the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, and the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Until we get our hands on the iPhone 16 series for testing ourselves, these claims from Apple are the best indication we have of the performance of these new chipsets.
A18 Specifications and Performance Enhancements
The A18 chip inside the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus features a 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU (which Apple dubiously calls “desktop class”), and a 16-core Neural Engine optimized for large generative models.
The CPU is divided into two performance cores for heavier tasks and four efficiency cores for lighter tasks. Apple claims this CPU is 30 percent faster than the one in the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.
According to Apple, the A18 delivers the same performance as the previous generation, but uses 30% less power.
Apple is making bolder claims about the GPU, claiming a 40% improvement in performance over the previous generation, with native support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing – a method of displaying light realistically that’s increasingly being used in modern games.
According to Apple, the A18’s GPU delivers the same performance as the previous generation, but uses 35% less power.
The entire chipset has 17% more memory bandwidth compared to the A16 Bionic. This is the amount of data the system can process at once, but Apple has not released specific numbers.
A18 Pro Specifications and Performance Enhancements
Apple claims the A18 Pro makes more modest improvements than the A17 Pro, but that’s not surprising given the already stellar performance of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
However, the company did call the A18’s CPU the “fastest CPU in a smartphone” during its recent ‘It’s Glowtime’ event.
The A18 Pro’s 6-core CPU is divided into two performance cores and four efficiency cores. Apple claims a 15% performance improvement over the previous generation.
According to the company, the A18 Pro delivers the same performance as the previous generation, but consumes 20% less power.
According to Apple, the A18 Pro’s 6-core GPU (one more core than the A18) offers a 20% performance improvement over the A17 Pro.
Apple showed Dead Stranding as an example of the type of games the A18 Pro can handle. The Kojima Productions game was first released on home consoles in 2019.
Like the A18, the A18 Pro features a 16-core Neural Engine, but also includes what Apple is calling “next-generation machine learning accelerators,” ostensibly to improve AI performance. And like the A18, memory bandwidth is improved by 17%.
The A18 Pro has two bonuses for pro users: Apple claims video encoding speeds have been doubled and data transfer over USB 3 is faster. However, those are the only details we got during the event.
The first 3nm smartphone chips
Apple says the A18 and A18 Pro are the world’s first 3nm smartphone chipsets. In chip manufacturing, nanometer (nm) refers to the microscopic width of a single transistor on a chip, processor or SoC. Each transistor can store one bit of information, so the more you can cram onto a surface, the more operations a chipset can perform.
Whether Apple’s implementation of 3nm technology has yielded any real benefits remains to be seen. Either way, it’s an impressive first, and will likely inspire other manufacturers to adopt 3nm in the coming year.