At the Glotime event on Monday, Apple launched two new chips: the A18 and the A18 Pro. The A18 Pro powers the new Pro models, the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Apple claims the A18 Pro is its fastest and best-performing iPhone chipset ever. Apple says the A18 Pro has significant improvements over the A18 that powers the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. Built using a second-generation 3nm process, the A18 Pro chip has a 16-core Neural Engine that is optimized for generative AI tasks. With a 17 percent increase in memory bandwidth, Apple says Apple Intelligence runs 15 percent faster than the iPhone 17 Pro that uses the A15 Pro chip.

According to Apple, the A18 Pro also offers twice the ray tracing performance compared to the A17 Pro thanks to its enhanced processing capabilities. This includes two performance cores and four efficiency cores, providing an overall speed increase of 15 percent compared to the previous generation.

Unique to the Pro model, the A18 Pro enables advanced media features, including ProRes video recording and faster USB 3 transfer speeds. The camera system is made even better by a blend of hardware, software, and intelligence, all powered by the new chipset.

The GPU in the A18 Pro chip has a desktop-level design, making it 20 percent faster than the previous version and twice as fast at handling ray tracing.

Thanks to improved memory bandwidth and a larger cache, the A18 Pro also supports advanced media features such as ProMotion display, Always-On display, faster USB 3 speeds, and ProRes video recording. These features are exclusive to the Pro model and are not available on regular iPhones.

AI capabilities have also seen an increase. The 16-core NPU can handle 35 trillion operations per second and has 17 percent more memory bandwidth, making it twice as fast and efficient as the older version.

For reference, the standard A18 chip shares many similarities with the A18 Pro, including a 6-core CPU that’s 30 percent faster and 30 percent more power-efficient than the A16 Bionic found in the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus. However, the main differences are in the GPU and image processing. The regular A18 has a 5-core GPU, which offers 40 percent better graphics performance while also using 35 percent less power than the A16. It lacks the “advanced media” features available in the Pro model, but remains a significant upgrade over its predecessor.