Apple introduces its new A18 and A18 Pro chipsets, powering the latest iPhone 16 Series

09 September 2024

This year Apple introduced not one, but two entirely new chipsets - the A18 and A18 Pro. This is also the first time the vanilla iPhone models, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus in particular, get a recent chipset, not a year-old one. Perhaps the main reason is to enable the high-demanding AI-related tasks and features under the Apple Intelligence umbrella. They weren't available on the A16 Bionic.

As the names suggest, the A18 Pro powers up the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max, while the non-Pro A18 is at the heart of the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. Let's start with the A18 Pro.

Apple A18 Pro

The A18 Pro is built on the 3nm manufacturing node, but this is the second-generation manufacturing process, which is more refined and efficient. The A18 Pro houses the "fastest CPU in any smartphone" and consists of 6 cores - two main cores doing the heavy lifting and four energy-efficient cores. Put together, they outperform the A17 Pro's CPU by 15% while using 20% less power.

As for the GPU, it gets a desktop-class architecture and can outperform its predecessor by 20% and can do ray tracing twice as fast.

The improved memory bandwidth and the larger cache size allow the A18 Pro get some "Advanced media" features support. Those include a ProMotion display supoprt, Always-on display support, faster USB 3 speeds and ProRes video recording. These features are all unavailable on the regular iPhones.

There's also a new image processing unit that improves camera performance and data processing for video encoding. That last bit is twice as fast on the A18 Pro compared to the A17 Pro.

Of course, the AI-related capabilities are all better now. The NPU gets 16 cores capable of 35 trillion operations per second and gets access to 17% more memory bandwidth. It's supposed to be 2x faster and more efficient than its predecessor.

Apple A18

The vanilla A18 chip also gets the new NPU treatment and it's largely the same as its Pro sibling. It has a 6-core CPU with the same setup and it's 30% faster than last year's A16 Bionic found in the vanilla iPhone 15 and 15 Plus. It also uses 30% less power than its predecessor for the same workloads.

The difference lies within the GPU and the image processing capabilities. The non-Pro doesn't get the so-called "Advanced media" features, while the GPU gets a 5-core setup instead of a 6-core setup. It's still pretty fast, though, as Apple claims 40% gains in graphics performance over the A16 Bionic and uses 35% less power, too.

As per usual, Apple doesn't give away too much information about its hardware, so we will have to wait a little before we get more detailed specs, such as CPU and GPU clock speeds, memory used, etc.