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When Apple trots out a new iPhone, it's always quick to point out how much faster it is than last year's iPhone or the model before that if it really wants to throw out a big percentage jump in performance. And sure enough, after showing off iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro at its "awe dropping" September event, Apple got to the performance claims for the A19 Pro chip that powers both of these new iPhones.
Apple says the iPhone 17 Pro offers up to 40 percent better sustained performance than the iPhone 16 Pro. And when discussing the AI performance of the iPhone 17 Air, Apple estimates that the new neural accelerators located on each of five GPU cores gives the A19 Pro a 3X gain in the peak GPU compute compared to last year's A18 Pro.
But before he ended his bit about the iPhone 17 Air's performance, Apple's SVP of Hardware Engineering John Ternus gave us this unusual line, "This is MacBook Pro levels of compute in an iPhone, perfect for GPU-intensive AI workloads."
That's the first time I've heard an iPhone's performance compared to that of a MacBook. Of course, Tetanus didn't say which model of MacBook Pro he was using for the comparison, but it's certainly a bold statement, to skip past the MacBook Air and even the M4-powered iPad Pro and go right to the most powerful MacBook.
The iPhone 17 Air features an A19 Pro chip with a 5-core GPU that has a neural accelerator on each core to assist with AI workloads.
Matt Elliott/CNETHere are my two takeaways from this statement:
1. Apple is feeling the pressure to catch up to Google Gemini-powered Pixel phones in the generative AI race and is signaling that a serious AI upgrade to Siri is coming sooner than later. And when it does arrive, Apple wants us all to know that the iPhones it released today have the goods to perform the on-device AI tasks of the new-and-improved, AI-enhanced Siri.
2. We might see a MacBook in the coming year based not on an M5 chip but the A19 Pro. I doubt we'll see a budget MacBook Pro based on anything other than Apple's latest M-series processor, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the rumored $599 MacBook Air get the A19 Pro.
A19 Pro specs and the different performance claims
First, the specs for the A19 Pro chip:
In both the iPhone 17 Air and 17 Pro, the A19 Pro chip features a 6-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores and a 16-core neural engine. You get an extra GPU core in with the iPhone 17 Pro -- it has a 6-core GPU to the 17 Air's 5-core GPU.
The iPhone 17 Pro has an A19 Pro with a 6-core CPU and 6-core GPU.
Matt Elliott/CNETThese are the same core specs (pardon the pun) as the A18 Pro -- a 6-core CPU, 6-core GPU, 16-core neural engine -- but Apple touted improvements to its chip architecture for the A19 Pro, including improved front-end bandwidth and branch prediction of the CPU's two performance cores and a 50-percent increase in last-level cache size of the four efficiency cores. On the GPU, the A19 Pro moves to the second generation of Apple's Dynamic Caching architecture and doubles its 16-bit floating-point math performance, which is crucial for on-device AI.
There are two reasons why Apple made different performance claims when introducing the iPhone 17 Air and 17 Pro. The first is the extra GPU core on the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro. And the second is the larger chassis with the more advanced cooling system of the iPhone 17 Pro that allows the A19 Pro to run faster than it can in the ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air where thermal throttling is certainly in effect.
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