The iPhone 16 series will be powered by the A18 Pro chipset. With the upcoming iPhones, Apple has finally joined the AI race and developed a few exciting AI features.
Performing AI-related tasks requires NPUs (Neural Processing Units) in an SoC. The latest news is about the Apple A18 Pro’s NPU. It has been reported that the Apple A18 Pro’s NPU is more capable than the Apple M4 SoC inside the latest iPad Pro. Moreover, iPhones with NPUs are likely to have respectable AI performance.
Apple’s A17 Pro chip, which powers the iPhone 15 Pro models, has 16 cores and measures 35TOPS for AI performance. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 from last year offers an AI performance of 15TOPS. It will be interesting to see what Qualcomm achieves with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC this year.
This year’s iPad Pros are equipped with the M4 chipset, which uses TSMC’s 3nm process node, and its NPU capability is 37 TOPS, slightly higher than last year’s A17 Pro. There is now speculation that Apple’s new smartphone chipset will once again surpass the M4. Even so, other aspects of a device, such as its form factor, can influence the end-user experience or AI features implemented.
Apple announced “Apple Intelligence” at its last Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The feature is integrated into the iOS 18 system apps and Siri’s voice assistant. As Apple focuses on running as many AI features as possible natively on iPhones, iOS 18 now requires chipsets with powerful NPUs.
A18 Pro’s NPU capability could exceed 45 TOPS, exceeding Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite’s NPU, the strongest among current Windows AI PC processors.
