The Apple A18 and A18 Pro chips debuted on the new iPhone 16 Series, announced during their September 2024 Keynote.
The A18 chip was built on a second-gen 3nm process for the standard iPhone models. It has a six-core CPU and a five-core GPU, promising a 30% improvement in CPU performance compared to the A16 Bionic.
Meanwhile, the GPU promises a 40% improvement even with one less core compared to last year’s A17 Pro chip. This chip is powering the relatively fresh iPhone 15 Pro Max model. The chip also has a 16-core Neural Engine with Apple promising that it’ll be twice as good as its predecessor.
Moving on, we have the A18 Pro chip. It has a six-core CPU, six-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine. Apple says that the CPU is 15% faster than the A17 Pro. It has a similar setup consisting of two performance and four efficiency cores.
What’s odd though is that the Neural Engine promises 35 TOPS, which the A17 Pro also does. Somehow, Apple says it’s faster than before.
What stands out about the A18 Pro chip is the 17% increase in memory bandwidth. This matters for larger on-device models, meaning that Apple Intelligence can run faster by 15% on the iPhone Pro devices.
Apple also notes that the A18 Pro chips have better image processing capabilities. They added that the iPhone 16 Pro devices are twice as good for video encoding.
For gamers, Apple said that the iPhone 16’s thermal design can alleviate heat from devices more efficiently. They added that the new chips now support ray tracing to make for more realistic images.
The devices are now slated to support “AAA” games. This feature used to be restricted to the past iPhone 15 Pro models.
