To nobody’s surprise, Apple today debuted its A18 system-on-a-chip, the successor to the A17 Pro chip it announced at its last iPhone event.
If you recall, at that time, Apple only announced an A17 Pro, which was featured in the iPhone Pro and Pro Max models, leaving some to speculate that a regular A17 chip would later find its way to other Apple products. With last year’s models’ Apple kept the standard iPhone 15 on the A16 Bionic chip it launched with the iPhone 14 Pro.
Unlike with other chip announcements, Apple was a bit coy with details, though we’ll probably get a few more after the event.
We know that the A18 is built on a 3nm process, for example, but that was also true for the A17 Pro. The A17 Pro was a 19-billion transistor SoC and featured 6 CPU cores (2 performance and 4 efficiency ones), 6 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine that topped out at 35 TOPS.
For the A18, Apple is going with a 6-core CPU but stepping the GPU down to 5 cores. The company isn’t comparing the A18 to the A17 Pro. Instead, it promises a 30% improvement in CPU performance over the A16 Bionic. Similarly, for the GPU, it promises a 40% improvement. As for the 16-core Neural Engine, the same number of cores we saw on the A17 Pro, Apple promises it will see a 2x improvement.
