Apple A17 Pro vs A18 Pro: Which is the most powerful processor?

Apple unveiled its new iPhones during its recent September 9 event. While that was the highlight, the company also announced the new A18 Bionic lineup – its most advanced chipset yet. It surpasses its predecessor, the A17 Bionic, by a significant margin and delivers the most efficient iPhone performance till date.

Given the two chipsets are quite contrasting in terms of features, it's only natural to be confused about which one to go for if you're looking to buy an iPhone soon. To help you get a better understanding, we have put together this comparison between the new A18 Pro Bionic and last year's A17 Pro Bionic chipset.

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A17 Pro vs A18 Pro: What are their specifications?

The new A18 Pro Bionic chipset (Image via Apple)

The new iPhone 16 lineup is taking a big leap in terms of processors as it jumps two generations, moving from the A16 Bionic on the iPhone 15 to the A18 Bionic on the iPhone 16 base model. The A17 Pro chip, however, was limited to iPhone 15 Pro variants, so it makes for a much fairer comparison with the A18 Pro chip of the new iPhone 16 Pro.

Features	Apple A17 Pro	Apple A18 Pro
Process	3nm	3nm (2nd-gen)
Cores	6	6
GPU	6 (1398 MHz)	6 (1450 MHz)
Frequency	3780 MHz	3890 MHz
Memory Type	LPDDR5	LPDDR5T

The new A18 Pro chip is a step up from the previous A17 Pro chip from the iPhone 15 Pro, but it isn't anything monumental. The A18 Pro comes with increased memory bandwidth and faster Apple Intelligence features. This means AAA titles will work much more efficiently and hardware-accelerated ray-tracing is almost 2x better than with the A17 Pro.

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A17 Pro vs A18 Pro: Performance

Game line-up on the new iPhone 16 (Image via Apple)

While both chips are super efficient and fast, the A18 Pro easily outperforms the Apple A17 Pro chipset. Hardware-accelerated ray-tracing enables much sharper visuals, almost providing console-level graphics on games like Assassin's Creed: Mirage.

These are the benchmarks we sourced from NanoReview:

Benchmark	Apple A17 Pro	Apple A18 Pro
AnTuTu 10	1528179	1915345
Geekbench 6 single-core	2953	3678
Geekbench 6 multi-core	7441	8974

As you can see, the new A18 Pro chip quite easily outperforms the latter in terms of single-core performance and even more so during multi-core tasks. This just goes to show how much more efficient the new chipset is and how good it'd be for gaming and video editing.

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Apple A17 Pro vs A18 Pro: Final Verdict

If we're going neck and neck, the new A18 Pro chip would undoubtedly be the better chipset. It makes for a far better choice in terms of daily processing, gaming, and even video editing. Not only that, you get all the features of the new iPhone 16 as well, so overall, it makes for a solid buy.

That said, the iPhone 15 Pro is nowhere near obsolete and the A17 Pro in it is still just as capable and performant. However, it is reasonably inferior if directly compared with the new A18 Pro Bionic.

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• A16 Bionic vs A17 Pro: Which is the most powerful processor?