iPhone 15 Pro Max Neural Engine Sees Huge Performance Boost After iOS 18 Update, Up To 25 Percent Gains In Early Benchmarks

Apple’s iOS 18 announcement gave us more than we asked for, and the company’s approach toward the end-user has changed over the past few years. The company has set a limitation for its high-end Apple Intelligence features, requiring an iPhone 15 Pro that features an A17 Pro chip with a faster Neural Engine than its predecessors. Now that iOS 18 is out and about as a developer beta, it has been discovered that the Neural Engine in the iPhone 15 Pro Max is 25 percent faster than before.

Early benchmarks show a 25 percent gain in iPhone 15 Pro Max Neural Engine performance

iOS 17 was not able to fully take advantage of the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro models and remained untempered until the company announced iOS 18. It has been observed that the Neural Engine in the iPhone 15 Pro Max is up to 25 percent faster than before, which would prove to be a major help in terms of machine learning or Apple Intelligence tasks.

Discovered by INIYSA, the Geekbench score for the Core ML Neural Engine Inference Score on the iPhone 15 Pro Max was 6,000 when running iOS 17.4.1. However, after updating the device to the first beta of iOS 18, the score saw a notable jump to 7,816. It can be seen that the score is up to 25 percent higher than the iPhone 15 Pro Max running the currently available iOS 17.4.1. The company could have kept the A17 Pro’s capabilities hidden, as it would have been an overkill for features present in iOS 17.

The massive performance jump could be related to the new Core ML type, MLTensor, which allows multidimensional arrays of computations with a familiar API. Check out how the company explains the new Core ML type.

The company also anticipates an increase in the performance of the Neural Engine for the iPhone 15 Pro, catering to different machine learning models. This also includes a marginal 2 percent increase in MobibleNet v3, a 66 percent increase for the ALBERT model, and a massive 700 percent gain in SSD MobileVit v2 performance. It is surprising to see how the A17 Pro housed an underclocked Neural Engine while the company waited for the release of iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence to utilize its true potential.

Apple’s next-gen iPhone 16 Pro models will house the A18 Pro chip, which will bring further enhancements to the table, including an even more powerful Neural Engine. iOS 18 is currently in its beta phase, and the subsequent beta builds could potentially optimize the performance further. We will be covering details related to iOS 18 in extensive detail, so be sure to stick around.