Apple has officially announced the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro models. Among the many attractions of the brand’s new generation of phones are two powerful chips: the Apple A18 and the Apple A18 Pro. They promise great performance in CPU, graphics and, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence.
Apple A18 Features
The Apple A18 that powers the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus is a chip manufactured with the second generation of TSMC’s 3-nanometer technology. It has six CPU cores that, in Apple’s words, are up to 30% faster than the previous chip, the A16 Bionic. There are two high-performance cores plus four energy-efficient cores.
Compared to the A15 Bionic (iPhones 14 and 13) and A14 Bionic (iPhone 12), the new CPU’s performance gains reach 50% and 60%, respectively:
The A18 is also more energy efficient: it can run the same workload as the A16 Bionic while requiring 30% less power, explains Apple.
For artificial intelligence, which especially involves Apple Intelligence features, the A18 has a 16-core Neural Engine optimized for generative language models and is up to twice as fast as the previous generation.
Perhaps the new chip’s advances will be most noticeable to gamers. Apple says the A18 has a five-core GPU that’s up to 40 percent faster than the A16 Bionic, as well as being 35 percent more power efficient.
Apple also highlights support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which should ensure up to five times higher frame rates per second (fps) in games than if the feature worked solely on a software basis.
Apple A18 Pro Features
The iPhone 16 Pro lineup is powered by the Apple A18 Pro, which is also based on a second-generation 3-nanometer process.
Here we also find two performance cores and four energy-efficient cores, but Apple says the Pro version has some features that make it more agile than the “normal” A18, such as more cache memory and new accelerators for machine learning.
Compared to the previous generation, Apple claims that the A18 Pro is up to 15% faster than the A17 Pro in CPU, while demanding up to 20% less power.
The A18 Pro’s GPU has six cores (versus five on the “normal” A18) and is up to 20% faster than the A17 Pro. There’s also hardware ray tracing acceleration here.
Other features of the Apple A18 Pro include the same 16-core Neural Engine as the A18, dedicated circuitry for Always-On Display, ProMotion and ProRes video recording, and support for faster transmissions via USB 3.
In addition to the iPhone 16 lineup, Apple announced the AirPods 4, the Apple Watch 10 lineup, and the final version of iOS 18.
