Leaked Apple A18 chipset benchmarks peg iPhone 16 Pro as gaming beast

• Alleged Apple A18 processor series benchmarks popped up.
• The A18 CPU performs on par with the A17.
• The A18 Pro series graphics are nearly 40% faster.

The new A18 processors are reportedly in the trial production and testing phase at the TSMC foundry, and will use its enhanced 3nm N3E process node. The second generation of a production node typically brings stability and power draw improvements, rather than some grand performance boost, so Apple might indeed be using it to add features instead of clock speed.

Apple A18 benchmarks 

The posts on Weibo have subsequently been deleted, but a few snapshots detail that these are based on pre-production versions and reference boards, so Apple may decide to tune the performance/feature/power draw ratio further for the retail iPhone 16 handsets.

The first pass shows somewhat boosted results that show that the A8 processor may be much faster than the current A17 crop. The pass doesn’t specify the clock speed that the chipsets were running on, but the second suite of A18 benchmarks posted shows a more credible performance score that is roughly in line with the current generation.

Where the iPhone 16 Pro series might shine, though, is in the gaming, computational photography, and other departments that need a powerful graphics subsystem. Compared to the current iPhone 15 Pro GPU, the Apple A18 Pro graphics benchmarks show that it may be more than 30% faster.