Apple has launched its flagship iPhone 16 Pro series with the new A18 Pro chipset. The Apple A18 Pro features huge improvements in CPU performance and efficiency, and it delivers powerful graphics and top-notch AI performance. On the Android side, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is still the leading chipset, so we've come up with a detailed comparison between the Apple A18 Pro and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

First, the A18 Pro is manufactured on TSMC's much improved N3E process node (3nm). And just like last year, the CPU has six cores with 2x performance cores and 4x efficiency cores. Two performance cores run at a mighty 4.04GHz frequency.

Apple has also adopted the Armv9.2a architecture for the A18 Pro with SME/SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension) support. The new SME devices aka ML accelerators significantly improve performance in AI and ML applications. That said, there is no support for SVE (Scalable Vector Extension). Image courtesy: Apple

Geekbench 6.3 recently added SME support, which is why the A18 Pro scores better on the Geekbench CPU benchmark compared to other mobile chipsets that lack SME. The A18 Pro in Geekbench 6.3 has achieved 3,409 and 8,492 points in single-core and multi-core tests, respectively.