Just like A18 was key to enabling iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro’s unique performance and feature requirements demanded a new Pro chip. The A18 Pro is even faster and more efficient than A18, and it enables many of the features that are unique to iPhone 16 Pro. A18 Pro is also built with second-generation 3nm transistors. Apple’s chips are the first smartphone chips in the world to use these smaller transistors with better density, performance, and efficiency.
A18 Pro also has the new 16-core neural engine that powers amazing on-device performance for Apple intelligence. This incredibly powerful neural engine excels at generative AI workloads. Compared to the neural engine in A17 Pro, it’s faster and more efficient, and it’s supported by a 17% increase in total system memory bandwidth. It’s designed hand-in-hand with Apple intelligence for even better performance. Combined with the increased memory bandwidth, Apple intelligence features run up to 15% faster than on A17 Pro.
The updated memory subsystem improves graphics performance as well when paired with the new faster 6-core GPU of A18 Pro. This helps the GPU to run up to 20% faster than A17 Pro. This takes AAA games even further with A18 Pro. Thanks specifically to new enhancements to the GPU architecture, hardware acceleration can perform ray tracing up to two times faster than A17 Pro.
A18 Pro has the highest performance implementation of Apple’s latest 6-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores. The new CPU is up to 15% faster than A17 Pro and is capable of delivering the same performance using 20% less power compared to A17 Pro. Compared to A18, it’s backed by larger caches for better performance in the most demanding apps and games. This is the fastest CPU in any smartphone.
The new CPU also has next-generation ML accelerators that help power Apple intelligence. They’re now directly programmable for high efficiency, high throughput, and low latency computations.
A18 Pro also has advanced media features that are available only on iPhone 16 Pro models, like the new advanced display engine for ProMotion and Always On. A18 Pro also enables faster USB 3 speeds and ProRes video recording. Additionally, A18 Pro has a new video encoder and a new image signal processor, which together process two times the amount of data for super fast encoding and improved efficiency for video.
As you can see, Apple designed A18 Pro to enable all the advanced capabilities of iPhone 16 Pro. It also powers never-before-seen camera features.