Apple's A18 Chip: Powering iPhone 16 with Advanced AI Capabilities

Apple's A18 chip will power the iPhone 16 lineup

Apple is giving the iPhone 16 a brand new chip, instead of just sticking with last year's hardware. The company unveiled the A18 chip at the iPhone 16 launch event today, and as you'd expect, it's built with Apple Intelligence in mind. The chip offers more memory and a new 16-core Neural Engine, in addition to the usual speed bumps. More so than the past few years, where you could point to new camera lenses or hardware tweaks as a reason to get a new iPhone, now the A18 is key to Apple's biggest selling point for the iPhone 16 lineup. Other than last year's iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, older iPhones can't run Apple Intelligence features like the revamped Siri, Genmoji and integrated ChatGPT search. (Anyone who splurged for those higher end iPhones chose wisely, as there's little reason to upgrade.) AI workloads require plenty of RAM to juggle large models, so that alone disqualifies the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, which only had 6GB of RAM on the A16 chip (a holdover from the iPhone 14 Pro). The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, on the other hand, featured 8GB of RAM with the A17 Pro chip. Apple's previous strategy of using the previous year's chips on the iPhone and iPhone Plus made sense. Those devices didn't require the demanding camera processing of the Pro models, which were entirely geared towards power users. Apple could both cut manufacturing costs and still deliver a solid user experience for iPhone owners with older chips. (Even though it debuted in 2022, the A16 chip in the iPhone 15 is still very capable today.) But now that Apple is centering the iPhone experience on Apple Intelligence, a family-wide spec bump isn't too surprising. And even if you're not excited about Apple's AI offerings (which they'll never actually call AI), it's nice to have some more RAM in the base iPhone line.

Apple's A18 chip "designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up"

Both new iPhones get new chips at the same time for the first time in years. For the last couple years, Apple has reserved its most significant silicon updates for its iPhone Pro models, while the less expensive non-Pro iPhones have made do with year-old chips. This year, Apple is introducing new A18-series chips for both Pro and non-Pro iPhones, chips which it says are "designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up." The Apple A18 (no Pro, no Bionic, just A18) will power the new iPhone 16 and 16 Plus -- the iPhone 15 used an A16 Bionic, and jumping two chip generations in one year makes for more impressive-sounding performance numbers. Like the last few generations of iPhone chip, the A18 includes a 6-core CPU, with two high-performance processor cores and four high-efficiency cores. Apple says the CPU is 30 percent faster than the A16 chip in the iPhone 15. The A18 also includes a 5-core GPU that Apple says is 40 percent faster than the GPU in the iPhone 15 -- the A18 GPU also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, first introduced in the A17 Pro. A 16-core neural engine will accelerate Apple Intelligence's AI and machine learning capabilities, and 17 percent higher memory bandwidth compared to the A16 rounds out its capabilities. The chip is built using a "second-generation 3nm" manufacturing process, most likely from longtime Apple manufacturing partner TSMC. Apple didn't mention RAM specifically -- it rarely does, for iPhones -- but the A18 likely has at least 8GB of RAM to help it run Apple Intelligence models. The A16 in the iPhone 15 included 6GB of RAM. The iPhone 16 Pro gets a new Pro chip; the A18 Pro's upgrades over the A18 are mostly subtle, and it's less of an upgrade over the iPhone 15 Pro and its A17 Pro chip. Apple is still using a six-core CPU with two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, but Apple says that "larger caches" and "next-generation ML accelerators" will boost its performance a bit beyond the cores in the regular A18. Apple says CPU performance should be around 15 percent faster than in the A17 Pro. The GPU in the A18 Pro uses the same architecture as the A18, but it has six GPU cores instead of five, and is 20 percent faster than the A17 Pro's GPU. Apple did say that hardware-accelerated ray-tracing could be up to twice as fast as in the A17 Pro, but the regular A18 Pro should benefit from this improvement, too. The A18 Pro has the same 16-core Neural Engine as the A18, and also benefits from 17 percent more memory bandwidth. Some of the things that make the A18 Pro "pro" are related to its I/O, and its media encoding and decoding hardware. The A18 Pro supports ProRest video encoding, has a new image signal processor that apparently isn't in the A18, and also supports "faster USB 3 speeds" than the A17 Pro. For those using their iPhones to shoot professional-grade video, these are small-but-welcome improvements over the A18 that will help shoot better video, and make it easier to offload video to a computer when it's time to edit.

iPhone 16 is powered by A18 chip, up to 30% faster than iPhone 15 - 9to5Mac

Apple today announced the new A18 chip, featuring a six-core CPU, five-core GPU, and sixteen-core Neural Engine for faster artificial intelligence performance. Apple also said the A18 has a new memory subsystem to traffic data as quickly as possible. Compared to iPhone 15 with the A16 Bionic chip, Apple says the A18 chip is up to 30% in single-core CPU performance. In addition to faster performance, Apple also touted the efficiency improvements in the A18 chip, partly enabled via a second-generation 3-nanometer fabrication. Apple says the iPhone 16 is built from the ground-up for Apple Intelligence, powered by the industry-leading performance of the A18 chip architecture.