Did you think your iPhone or iPad couldn’t get any better? Think again ! With iOS 18, Apple significantly improves the AI performance of its mobile devices.
If you’re an iPhone or iPad user, you’ll be happy to know that the iOS 18 update will boost your device’s AI performance.
At WWDC 2024, Apple announced that the update would improve the AI performance of Apple Silicon, the neural engine of Apple SoCs. But concretely, what does this mean for you?
Apple’s Neural Engine, also known as Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to others, is a computing unit dedicated to AI tasks. It was introduced at Apple with the A11 Bionic installed on the iPhone 8 and has since been improved with each new generation of SoC. With iOS 18, Apple wants to use Apple Intelligence, AI and LLM on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and improves the AI performance of Apple Silicon with an update.
Considerable performance gains
According to Apple, AI performance in iOS 18 will be automatically delivered to user devices with the software update in the fall. A graph shows how prediction performance under iOS 18 on an iPhone 15 Pro increases significantly compared to iOS 17.5.1. With GPT 2, Apple is talking about an increase of 270%.
Performance gains are also expected to differ by AI model and hardware. Not all accelerated devices or tasks will see the same performance gains from AI. However, Geekbench ML results already show a significant increase in performance in the current first developer beta for iOS 18.
Improvements for all devices
But older iPhones also benefit from the update: one user was able to increase their NPU score from 6,249 to 7,816 points on an iPhone 13 Pro running iOS 18, an increase of around 25 percent. On an iPad Pro with an M4 chip, the benchmark increase is also only around 7%.
However, the Geekbench ML results should be viewed with caution at the moment: while it is clear that Apple chips are getting faster in some areas, iOS 18 is still in beta and this may influence the final performance in the benchmarks . It remains to be seen how much additional power will actually be available in the fall.
