On September 10, Apple officially released the A18/A18 Pro Bionic chips. Next, CNMO will introduce the highlights of these two chips.
The A18 Bionic chip is designed specifically for the iPhone 16 and has achieved a qualitative leap in performance. The A18 chip uses a 6-core CPU architecture, including 2 high-performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores. Compared with the previous generation A16 Bionic chip, the running speed has increased by up to 30%, and compared with the A14 Bionic chip of the iPhone 12, it has achieved a significant growth rate of 60%. In addition, the A18 is also equipped with a desktop-level GPU architecture with a 5-core GPU. Its performance is 40% faster than that of the iPhone 15 and twice that of the iPhone 12. At the same time, it is more energy-efficient and can reduce power consumption by 35% while maintaining the same performance.
The A18 chip also excels in energy efficiency, with power consumption 30% lower than the A16 Bionic chip. In addition to CPU and GPU upgrades, the A18 is also equipped with a 16-core neural engine, which is specially optimized for running large generative models. Compared with the previous generation, the A18 can process machine learning tasks up to twice as fast as the previous generation. In addition, the A18 also has 17% more system memory bandwidth than the previous generation, which means it can access generative models more efficiently.
The A18 Pro chip is tailor-made for the iPhone 16 Pro series. The A18 Pro is equipped with 2 high-performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores. Compared with the A17 Pro, its processing speed is increased by up to 15%, while maintaining the same performance output while reducing energy consumption by 20%.
In terms of graphics processing, the A18 Pro uses a new 6-core GPU architecture, which improves performance by 20% compared to the A17 Pro. At the same time, the chip also has powerful video encoding capabilities and supports double data processing speed. It is worth mentioning that the A18 Pro is the world’s first smartphone chip using second-generation 3-nanometer transistors.
Not only that, the A18 Pro is also equipped with a larger cache. At the same time, the chip also integrates advanced media functions, supports ProMotion and Always-On display technology. In addition, the A18 Pro also provides faster USB 3 transfer speeds and ProRes video recording capabilities.
