The iPhone 16’s A18 chip looks to only be a small upgrade on the iPhone 15’s A16 Bionic

Barely beating a two-year-old chipset

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If you were hoping for massive performance gains from the A18 chipset in theiPhone 16, you might be out of luck, as a benchmark suggests there are only small improvements.

AGeekbenchlisting spotted by9to5Macincludes a single-core result of 3,114 and a multi-core result of 6,666. This is for a phone with the identifier ‘iPhone17,3’, which is believed to be the base iPhone 16.

In any case, for comparison, theiPhone 15has an average single-core result of 2,541 and an average multi-core of 6,325. So that would make for a reasonable upgrade this year in the single-core score but a fairly small multi-core increase.

And neither of these scores seem to matchApple’s claims for the chip, as the company has said it has a CPU that’s up to 30% faster and a GPU that’s up to 40% faster than the A16 Bionic.

And of course, the A16 Bionic is a two-year old chip. If we compare these results to the average scores of theiPhone 15 Proand its one-year-old A17 Pro chipset, things look a lot worse, at least in terms of multi-core results.

That phone achieves an average single-core score of 2,896, so the A18 has that beat, but its multi-core average is much higher at 7,192.

Newer but maybe not better

So for most demanding tasks the A17 Pro is probably a better chipset than the A18. That’s not entirely surprising, but it does feel sneaky of Apple, as the company can highlight that the iPhone 16 has a newer chipset with a bigger number in the name, while actually it’s less impressive than the chipset launched by the company last year.

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Of course, the A18 Pro used by theiPhone 16 Proand theiPhone 16 Pro Maxwill likely perform a lot better, so we’ll be interested in seeing benchmarks for that. And since this is just one benchmark listing it’s possible that the scores here won’t prove representative of what the A18 is capable of. But based on this initial result it doesn’t seem like a very impressive upgrade.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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