When the iPhone 16 line launches this September, it is expected to be equipped with new A-series processors. As has been the case in recent years, top-end “Pro” models will have the new processor, while regular iPhone 16 non-Pro models will have a version of the A17 Pro chip found in this year’s iPhone 15 Pro. There is a high possibility that it will be installed. .
Like every year, we take a look at the history and performance of A-series processors over the past few years, along with recent rumors and industry-wide trends, to predict what we can expect from Apple’s new iPhone silicon this fall. . As always, this is all just speculation. Apple is a notoriously secretive company, and the details of its products are often not fully revealed until after they’re released.
To be “pro” or not to be “pro”?
Last year, Apple introduced what could be a whole new wrinkle in its expected upgrade pattern. For the first time, the name change from “A17 Bionic” to “A17 Pro” means there will also be new non-Pro chips with each generation. That hasn’t happened yet, but something different could happen this year.
There are three possibilities that Apple could do in addition to manufacturing a new A18 Pro for the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max:
- Create a new A18 for regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. This is essentially the A17 Pro with a new name. There may be some technical differences, but the performance and features are the same as his A17 Pro.
- Apple is producing a newly designed A18 chip for non-Pro iPhones. It’s based on the same architecture as the A18 Pro, but has reduced performance in some areas (possibly due to lower clock speeds or fewer active cores).
- Apple will continue to use the A17 Pro for the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. The A18 Pro is the only “new” iPhone chip this year. This is what Apple did with the iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 generations.
It’s hard to say which is more likely, but one thing we do know is that the high-end chip will probably again have the name “Pro” rather than “Bionic” and will most likely launch only in the iPhone 16 Pro model. is. We’ve heard rumors that the lower-end chip in the iPhone 16 will be called “A18” this year, but even if that’s true, it remains to be seen whether it will really be a new chip or just a rebranded iPhone 17 Pro. I don’t understand. I heard similar rumors last year, but there were no results.
Our analysis here is for the A18 Pro, which Apple will be calling the high-end version of the chip that will power this year’s iPhones.
Still made on 3nm process
The A17 Pro is the first mass-market consumer chip using the 3nm manufacturing process. TSMC is on track to develop his next 2nm chip, but we don’t expect to see any of his Apple products using that process until next year at the earliest. Therefore, the A18 Pro will once again be manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process.
The 3nm process used for the A17 Pro is known as N3 and was quite expensive for the first iteration of TSMC’s 3nm technology. The company has adopted a new process known as N3E, which is much easier to manufacture at scale. It is slightly more power efficient than the original his N3 process, but also slightly less “densified”. This means that a chip built using N3E will be slightly larger than an identical chip made with N3.
There are rumors that the A18 Pro will be a physically larger chip than the A17 Pro. The switch to N3E may be one reason, but Apple also expects him to increase the transistor count to over 20 billion (the A17 Pro is his 19 billion transistor chip). To put this into perspective, the latest Intel “Raptor Lake” generation of laptop CPUs is estimated to have around 26 billion transistors, while the top-tier large Nvidia GeForce 4090 RTX desktop GPU has 74 billion transistors. transistor chip.
CPU performance is also likely to improve
All the rumors are focused on AI performance, and why not when it’s a hot topic today? But Apple has always focused on CPU performance, and the A series shares the core design between the iPhone/iPad chips and the M-series Mac (and iPad Pro) chips.
Take a look at the single-core Geekbench 6 performance graphs for iPhone chips up to the A11.
What I find most remarkable is the method. Steadily Single core performance has been improved. Continuing the trend of the past few chips, he extrapolated the A18’s performance and found his single-core Geekbench 6 score at nearly 3,200. This is slightly faster than the Intel Core i9-13900KS, which is a very high-end desktop CPU.
Of course, powerful desktop and laptop CPUs have more cores than your phone’s processor. The A18 Pro is expected to have the same core configuration as the latest A-series chips: two performance cores and four efficiency cores.
Even if Apple uses the same number of cores, faster cores, cache, and memory will improve multicore scores. We’ve also seen a fairly stable performance trend for multi-core performance, and we don’t expect that to suddenly change. A multi-core score of 8,200 or higher would put the A18 Pro in the same realm as mid-tier laptop CPUs from Intel or AMD from about three years ago.
GPU performance always improves
The latest 3DMark Wild Life benchmark in unrestricted mode gives you a good idea of how much GPU performance has improved over time. Frame rates have more than quadrupled since the iPhone X days. Not as stable as CPU performance. Some years the rate of increase is less than 10%, and other years it’s closer to 30%.
Rumor has it that Apple won’t be adding more GPU cores, but there’s no reason to believe that GPU performance won’t improve this time around as well. Architectural efficiency goes a long way. Our guess is that the actual CPU performance will increase by 10-15%.
The 3DMark Solar Bay test focuses on ray tracing performance, so you’ll see a significant drop in frame rate across the board.
Performance took time Huge Apple has added hardware to speed up ray tracing, so I jumped on the A17 Pro for this test. There may be some adjustments this year, but we don’t expect a similar jump in this test of the A18 Pro. You’ll probably see a 10-15% improvement.
Neural Engine could be significantly upgraded
Neural Engine is Apple’s name for NPU or “Neural Processor Unit.” In the same way that GPUs are made for graphics processing, they are specialized hardware made to optimally run neural networks for machine learning, deep learning, and AI software.
Apple is going all-in on AI this year, with major AI features said to be coming to iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 series. In other words, we can expect a significant improvement in the performance of the Neural Engine.
But the Neural Engine has been getting faster at a steady pace since it was first introduced in the A11 (found in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X). While the first Neural Engine could perform 600 billion operations per second, the A17 Pro’s Neural Engine is touted to be capable of processing 35 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Here we use the new GeekBench ML benchmark, which targets only NPUs, to show how performance gains manifest over time.
Geekbench ML is a relatively new benchmark, only available in version 0.6, that evaluates CPU, GPU, and NPU performance by performing a set of machine learning tasks, including image recognition, object classification, image super-resolution, and language processing. When running Neural Engine-only tests, we’ve seen an improvement of more than 8x over the past six years, with an average speedup of about 20% per year.
What’s notable is that even though Apple announced that Neural Engine performance has jumped from 17 TOPS to 35 TOPS, the score hasn’t doubled from the A16 to A17 generations. Claimed maximum performance specifications often do not match actual performance numbers.
Apple’s Neural Engine delivers significantly better performance than competitors such as the Snapdragon 8+ 1st generation NPU (approximately 2,800 points depending on the phone it’s equipped with) and Google’s Tensor G3 (less than 2,400 points). Already provided. Simply taking past performance gains into account and projecting them into the future gives you a score of almost 4,100 points, giving you a commanding lead over most of your competitors.
However, I think you can safely ignore this graph for the A18 Pro. Recent rumors suggest that Apple plans to allocate more silicon to Neural Engine and drive significant performance improvements to enable more advanced AI capabilities completely on-device. . I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple touted very big numbers for Neural Engine this year (almost certainly over 50 TOPS). Geekbench ML scores can approach 5,000.
RAM, 5G, etc.
Of course, there’s more to the A18 Pro than the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. Additionally, there are related chips that aren’t technically part of the A18 Pro but are still important to iPhone users, such as the cellular modem.
The new LPDDR6 memory standard is still too new to make it into this year’s iPhones, but Apple could move from LPDDR5 to LPDDR5x, allowing for slightly more memory bandwidth while lowering power consumption. . The A17 Pro made a jump from 6GB to 8GB of RAM, but it feels like it’s too soon for Apple to make that leap again. On the other hand, AI models tend to be very memory intensive, and it’s possible that Apple will increase RAM in new phones just to enable larger, more sophisticated AI models.
On the wireless front, expect an upgrade to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X75 modem for faster and more reliable 5G connectivity. Apple has been working on its own wireless chips for years, but has struggled to get them to a level that provides a good enough experience. There are also rumors of an upgrade to Wi-Fi 7, and of course we can expect ultra-wideband, Bluetooth, and NFC features similar to the iPhone 15 line.
