This year’s regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus get a new chipset. This year Apple introduced not one, but two entirely new chipsets — the A18 and A18 Pro. This.
This year Apple introduced not one, but two entirely new chipsets — the A18 and A18 Pro. This is also the first time the vanilla iPhone models, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus in particular, get a recent chipset, not a year-old one. Perhaps the main reason is to enable the high-demanding AI-related tasks and features under the Apple Intelligence umbrella. They weren’t available on the A16 Bionic.
As the names suggest, the A18 Pro powers up the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max, while the non-Pro A18 is at the heart of the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. Let’s start with the A18 Pro.
The A18 Pro is built on the 3nm manufacturing node, but this is the second-generation manufacturing process, which is more refined and efficient. The A18 Pro houses the «fastest CPU in any smartphone» and consists of 6 cores — two main cores doing the heavy lifting and four energy-efficient cores.
