What separates the new processors in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro? Apple hasn’t revealed much, so we ran benchmarks to see how the A18 and A18 Pro chips compare.
The iPhone 16 family runs the latest Apple silicon. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus use the A18, and the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max bump up to the A18 Pro. Apple hasn’t shared too much information about either chip. In fact, if we’re to believe the company’s website, a single GPU core is all that differentiates the two.
Based on the chip’s architectural diagram, the A18 includes two performance cores, four efficiency cores, five GPU cores, and 16 Neural Engine cores (or NPU). The A18 Pro adds one more GPU core to the mix, giving it a total of six rather than five. There are likely other differences. Notably, Apple hasn’t defined the clock speeds for the CPU cores. The A18 Pro likely has quicker CPU and GPU clock speeds than the A18. Given the drastic differences in video capture capabilities, it’s also likely that the image signal processor (ISP) is different in some regard. All we know with any real confidence is that all four iPhones share 8GB of RAM, the most ever in an iPhone.
With few details to go by, the best way to determine what sets these two processors apart is by testing them. We ran a series of benchmarks to see what makes the A18 Pro earn its « Pro » moniker. Here are the results. Note that we’ve included results for the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max in the chart for further comparison.Benchmarking the Apple A18 and A18 Pro
PCMag relies on a handful of benchmarking apps for evaluating phones. Each app we use is available via the App Store, so you can run your own tests at home to see how your results compare to ours.
