When Apple releases a new iPhone, it's always quick to point out how much faster it is than last year's iPhone. Often, it boasts a big percentage jump in performance. After showing off iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro at its "awe dropping" September event, Apple did just that with the new A19 Pro chip.
Apple says the iPhone 17 Pro offers up to 40% better sustained performance than the iPhone 16 Pro. Regarding the iPhone Air's AI performance, Apple estimates that the new neural accelerators located on each of the five GPU cores give the A19 Pro a 3x gain in the peak GPU compute compared to last year's A18 Pro.
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But before he ended his bit about the iPhone 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 go right to the most powerful MacBook.
The iPhone Air features an A19 Pro chip with a five-core GPU that has a neural accelerator on each core to assist with AI workloads. Matt Elliott/CNET
Here 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. When it does arrive, Apple likely 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. In the coming year, we might see a MacBook based not on an M5 chip but on 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, or at least an M-series chip based on the same architecture.
A19 Pro specs and the different performance claims
First, the specs for the A19 Pro chip:
In both the iPhone Air and 17 Pro, the A19 Pro chip features a six-core CPU with two performance cores, four efficiency cores and a 16-core neural engine. With the iPhone 17 Pro, you get an extra GPU core -- it has a six-core GPU to the Air's five-core GPU.
The iPhone 17 Pro has an A19 Pro with a 6-core CPU and 6-core GPU. Matt Elliott/CNET
These are the same core specs (pardon the pun) as the A18 Pro -- a six-core CPU, six-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% 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.
Apple made different performance claims when introducing the iPhone Air and 17 Pro. The first is the extra GPU core on the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro. The second is the larger chassis with the more advanced cooling system of the iPhone 17 Pro, which allows the A19 Pro to run faster than it can in the ultrathin iPhone Air, where thermal throttling is certainly in effect.
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