iPhone 16 leaks suggest Apple flagships could get major power boost for AI tricks

iPhone 15 Pro review front angled handheld
The iPhone 15 Pro (Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)

We haven't heard too much in the way of iPhone 16 rumors and leaks yet – the series isn't expected until September, after all – but we do now have a hint at just how powerful the chipset inside Apple's flagship phones for 2024 is going to be.

As per tipster Nguyen Phi Hung (via Wccftech), the upcoming A18 Pro chip is scoring 3,500 in single-core tests and 8,200 in multi-core tests (where multiple tasks are carried out in parallel) on the standard Geekbench 6 software.

It's definitely the former of those two figures that's the most impressive: a single-core score that high puts it some 14% ahead of Apple's own M3 chips and around 23% faster than predicted scores for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (due later this year and likely to power multiple flagship Android devices).

The multi-core scores are less impressive – by this benchmark, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is expected to be 29 percent faster. However, as Wccftech points out, the architecture design of the chips may be different, which will impact the overall efficiency and power draw of the processors once they're actually inside handsets.

Current models

iPhone 15 back handheld

The iPhone 15 (Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)

Both the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max have an A17 Pro chip inside, which scores 2,906 for single-core and 7,231 for multi-core, so you can see the sort of improvements that could be on the way – with the caveats that benchmarks only tell part of the performance story, and that development on the processor may not be finished yet.

The iPhone 15 and the iPhone 15 Plus run the A16 Bionic processor meanwhile, so the cheaper iPhone 16 models might get the A17 Pro this time around. That said, we have heard a rumor that Apple might stick the same processor inside all of its 2024 iPhone models, so we'll have to wait and see.

Other early iPhone 16 leaks that we've come across suggest that the new phones are going to get a new button for capturing photos and videos, and that certain models might be upping the amount of RAM that comes inside as well.

If these leaked benchmark scores do turn out to be accurate, the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max are going to be hard to beat in terms of performance – which may come in handy for all the AI features Apple is rumored to be preparing.

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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

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