Apple A18 vs A18 Pro: Benchmark Comparison

Oct. 5, 2024

This year, Apple has packed the new A18 chipset oniPhone 16 and 16 Pluswhile the premiumiPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Maxfeature the more powerful, A18 Pro SoC. On paper, both chipsets appear very similar so we conducted various benchmarks to find out the real-world performance differences betweenA18 and A18 Pro. On that note, let’s check out the findings.

Apple A18 vs A18 Pro: Specs Comparison

To test the GPU further, we ran the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress test on both A18 and A18 Pro. The 5-core A18 GPU gets the best loop score of 3,600 points and the lowest loop score of 2,370 points, with a stability of 65.8%.

In the 3DMark Solar Bay Unlimited test which puts the Ray Tracing units through its paces, the A18 gets an overall score of 7,068 with an average frame rate of 26.9 FPS. In contrast, the A18 Pro gets 7,985 points and achieves an average frame rate of 30.4 FPS. In Ray Tracing capability, the performance difference is around 13% between A18 and A18 Pro.3DMark Solar Bay UnlimitedA18A18 ProOverall score7,0687,985Average frame rate26.9 FPS30.4 FPS

In the latest version of Geekbench AI 1.1, the 16-core Neural Engine on both A18 and A18 Pro performs along the same lines. In fact, the A18 does slightly better in Half Precision (FP16) and Quantized (INT8) data types. Both Neural Engines have access to faster LPDDR5X memory (up to 7500 MT/s) which results in better performance. Simply put, A18 and A18 Pro are powerful enough to run on-deviceApple Intelligence featuresfor AI/ML tasks.Geekbench AIA18A18 ProSingle Precision Score4,2314,582Half Precision Score32,51831,990Quantized Score44,95343,995

After comparing the A18 and A18 Pro chipsets on several benchmarks, we can conclude that the A18 chipset is a notch below the A18 Pro. Recent reports also show that both chipsets have different SoC designs. However, you get the same CPU cores, but the cache size has been halved on A18. And on the GPU side, you get one less GPU core.

Overall, the performance difference in CPU is somewhere between 5% to 8%. In the GPU department, the A18 trails by around 15-20%. As far as day-to-day usage is concerned, you won’t find much difference except in sustained gaming performance. In my book, both are flagship-level chipsets.

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