Apple A18 Pro: Everything to know about the iPhone 16 Pro’s chipset

That turned out not to be the case, as even Apple's M1 AI coprocessor with its 11 TOPS count can run Apple Intelligence, let alone the A16 Bionic in the iPhone 15 with its 17 TOPS. According to Apple's Craig Federighi, the constraints were rather in the iPhone 15's 6GB RAM count.

Apple is launching the iPhone 16 series with a new A18 chipset that breaks the 4 GHz speed barrier for the first time. It also allows for a significant boost in on-device AI calculations and machine learning. The Apple A18 Bionic landed in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, while the top-shelf A18 Pro is powering the flagship iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max handsets.

The Apple A18 Pro features both a 6-core main processor and a 6-core graphics processing subsystem. Apple reportedly wanted to clock the two A18 Pro performance cores to the exorbitant 4.95 GHz clock frequency to no avail as the thermal management stability and power draw just weren't there at those speeds. As a result, it settled on the 4.05 GHz clock count, which will still be on par with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 speeds.

The iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are 20% faster than their predecessors with the 3nm A17 Pro whose peak speed is lower, at a 3.8 GHz clock frequency, with the corresponding lower benchmarks.

Thus, any speed advantages that the Apple A18 Pro on the iPhone 16 Pro may have before the A17 Pro on the iPhone 15 Pro might be coming solely from the increase in peak clock speeds, rather than the fact that it will be made on a more advanced production node.

A18 Pro production process

This is par for the course, as newer generations of a production node typically brings stability and power draw improvements, rather than some grand performance boost, so Apple might indeed be using it to add features to the A18, instead of clock speed.

The top-shelf Apple A18 Pro chipset version, however, may be crafted on TSMC's more expensive, lower yield N3P process that is 5% faster and consumes up to 10% less energy than the N3E (Enhanced) process that the A18 in iPhone 16 is using.

A18 Pro graphics

Where the iPhone 16 Pro series shines brighter is in the gaming, computational photography, AI, and other departments that need a powerful graphics subsystem. Compared to the current iPhone 15 GPU, the Apple A18 Pro graphics benchmarks show that it is nearly 40% faster. That's a huge jump, but only for the Pro models, where Apple will provide one extra GPU core.

The 6-core GPU increases the gaming street cred of the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, and it will also help it stay ahead of Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 8 processor series. It has been catching up to Apple in the GPU department lately, and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 in the Galaxy S25 Ultra won't be an exception, so Apple appears to have taken notice.

The Apple A17 Pro chipset's Neural Engine AI calculations subsystem has a 16-core coprocessor which is capable of 35 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS). That is more than double the 17 TOPS offered by the A16 Bionic processor. Apple, however, says that the A18 Pro's "new 16-core Neural Engine is faster and more efficient than the previous generation, powering remarkable on-device performance for Apple Intelligence."

The 2024 iPhones will be the first line that will not only support Apple Intelligence on all the handsets in the iPhone 16 series, but will also be future-proof for the upcoming Large Language Model bump from the current 3B LLM to a 7B LLM model.

The stripped down version of the Apple A18 for the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus comes with a 6-core processor as well, but a penta-core GPU, compared to the six cores of the graphics processor in the iPhone 16 Pro. The iPhone 16 processor also has reduced cache size compared to the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, and a lower clock speed.

Coupled with the TSMC N3E production process, the Apple A18 chip version in the iPhone 16 is a bit slower and more power-hungry than the A18 Pro processor in the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max. Apple, however, needs to make its newly minted Apple Intelligence features run without a hitch on all of its 2024 iPhones, so it has placed 8GB RAM in the cheapest iPhone 16 version for the first time, too.

Still, the difference between the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro processors is a lot smaller compared to the previous two iPhone generations, and that has to count for something.