Apple has announced its latest chipsets, the A18 and the new Pro variant of it, to handle the load on the iPhone 16 series. This is a big difference for Apple, as it means the standard iPhone models—iPhone 16 and also 16 Plus—are getting this year’s chipset rather than last year’s model. It ensures these models will be able to perform the high-demand AI tasks under Apple Intelligence that the A16 Bionic chipset simply couldn’t provide.
The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus get the A18 chipset, whereas the Pro models have a more advanced version called A18 Pro. They are both manufactured on a 3nm process, but the A18 Pro uses what is being described as a second generation of such nodes, allowing for better efficiency.
For the A18 Pro will be a 6-core CPU—two performance and four efficiency cores—which overall is up to %15 faster than the A17 Pro while consuming around %20 less power. It uses a desktop architecture for its GPU, with 20% improvement in performance and twice the ray tracing speed than on the previous model. It also supports some of the more advanced media features like ProMotion and Always-on display, faster USB 3 speeds, as well as support for ProRes video recording—something that’s a pro model exclusive. Also, a new image processing unit that processes twice faster video encoding and an enhanced neural processing unit (NPU) said to churn through 35 trillion operations per second with memory bandwidth up by 17%.
Meanwhile, the A18 chipset also gets a tweak to its NPU, which equates to 30% increased CPU performance and up to 30% lower power consumption than the ones on board of the A16 Bionic. While it only has a 5-core GPU arrangement, it manages to boost graphics performance by an incredible 40% while using 35% less power. The A18, however, does not come with the advanced media features which are present in its Pro variant.
Apple has not announced any hardware specifics like clock speeds for the GPU or CPU, and even little things like total memory bandwidth remain a mystery. The A18 and A18 Pro’s launch shows that Apple wants to put forward AI features along with performance efficiency in the iPhone 16 series.
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