The iPhone 16 family smartphones are launching the SoC. The leaks have hit the target once again, but the truth is that the arrival of the new iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max was predictable. Include A18 Pro chipWhat the leaks didn’t predict was that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus would feature the A18 SoC. There’s no doubt about one thing: the alliance between the Cupertino guys and the Taiwanese company TSMC is crucial for these new SoCs to see the light.

In 2021, 26% of TSMC’s revenue came from Apple, and that number has probably not changed much since then. Apple is a priority customer for the semiconductor manufacturer, which gives TSMC access to the most advanced lithographic nodes it has even before most other customers. On paper, the A18 Pro SoC looks good, but if we want to get a proper idea of ​​what it has to offer, it would be ideal to dig into it a little. Let’s get there.

An SoC designed to handle Apple’s AI

If you look at the spec sheet we’ve published a little further down, you’ll notice that the A18 Pro and A17 Pro chips are essentially the same. But in reality, they’re not. The SoC in the new iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max is manufactured on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm lithographic node (N3P), while the A17 Pro processor in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max comes from the first-generation 3nm node (N3). There may seem to be very few differences between these integration technologies, but nothing could be further from the truth.

It is worth noting that the main purpose of the theoretical power increase of the new Apple SoCs is to deal with Apple Intelligence, the artificial intelligence that this brand offers us in its new smartphones. In any case, what is worth noting is that Includes N3P lithography optimizations What is not present in the N3 node. In addition, the A18 Pro SoC uses faster transistors and implements a new microarchitecture, making its efficiency higher than the A17 Pro chip, at least on paper.

In the next slide, we can see that the A18 Pro SoC packs six CPU cores. Four of them are high-efficiency, while the remaining two are high-performance. Nothing new so far. But here’s the interesting thing, according to Apple, these cores are 15% faster than similar cores in the A17 Pro SoC, and they also consume 20% less power. Sounds good. As I mentioned above, these improvements are a result of the A18 Pro chip being manufactured on TSMC’s N3P node and its new microarchitecture. One more note: the lower levels of cache have more capacity than the A18 chip. It’s a shame Apple didn’t give us more details about the microarchitecture of its new SoC.

On the other hand, the Neural Engine of the A18 Pro SoC contains exactly the same number of cores as the A17 Pro chip: 16. Both chips perform the same number of operations (35 trillion/s), but all of this is equal. And according to Apple, the Neural Engine is integrated into the SoC of the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max It is faster and more efficient More than that implemented in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. In addition, and this is very important, the memory bandwidth has been increased by 17%, which will have a noticeable impact on the performance of the A18 Pro.

Now let’s move on to the graphics logic offered by the A18 Pro SoC. It includes six cores like the GPU of the A17 Pro chip, but its microarchitecture is different from its predecessor. This optimization, together with the improvement of the manufacturing process of the A18 Pro chip, makes it, according to Apple, 20% faster than the SoC integrated in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. It will be interesting to see how the most demanding games coming to these mobiles perform.

Another interesting fact that Apple promises us is that the ray tracing hardware implemented in the A18 Pro SoC is twice as fast as the A17 Pro chip. our experience with video games. It will be interesting to see when we fully analyze the new iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. It is clear that we cannot evaluate the performance of this graphical logic without testing it thoroughly, but it looks really good.

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