Apple A18 series chip specifications exposed: Pro version adopts new design

As the leader in the global mobile phone market, Apple's new generation of iPhones every year will receive widespread attention from the outside world early on. Recently, Apple officially released the invitation letter for the 2024 autumn new product launch conference. As previously predicted, the new iPhone 16 series will be officially unveiled at 1 a.m. on September 10. As the release date approaches, the outside world's revelations and progress about the phone are becoming more intensive. Now there is the latest news. Recently, a digital blogger has further brought more parameter details of the A18 series chips.

According to the latest information released by the well-known digital blogger @定焦数码, which is basically consistent with the previously exposed news, the new iPhone 16 series will be equipped with Apple's new generation A18 series chips as standard, and this series of chips actually includes two versions, A18 and A18 Pro. The A18 uses a configuration of 2 high-performance cores plus 4 small cores, and is equipped with a 5-core GPU; while the A18 Pro also uses a design of 2 high-performance cores plus 4 small cores, but its GPU core count has increased to 6. It is worth noting that the reason why these two chips are called independent designs is that the A18 is a remake of the A17 Pro with the N3E process, while the A18 Pro is a newly designed chip.

In other aspects, according to previously exposed news, the new iPhone 16 series will still include 4 models, including iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. The A18 series chips will be standard for the entire series. This will be Apple's most advanced and powerful processor, and it is expected to surpass Apple's own M4 processor in NPU performance. The M4 processor is based on TSMC's second-generation 3nm process, has 28 billion transistors, and the NPU computing power has been increased to 38TOPS. In addition, combined with previous related revelations, the A18 processor will also use a larger chip size to improve artificial intelligence (AI) performance. Of course, even if they are all A18 chips, the two standard versions and the two Pro versions are unlikely to be the same. For example, the iPhone 16/16 Plus is A18, and the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max are A18 Pro. The two will differ in the number of CPU and GPU cores.