Apple's A19 Pro throws down the gauntlet for Qualcomm and MediaTek

Apple just unveiled the iPhone 17 series, with the phones powered by the A19 and A19 Pro silicon. Like last year's A18-powered iPhone 16, the platforms are built on a 3nm node, and they share a similar core configuration, offering two performance and six efficiency cores. However, there are clear upgrades available this year, and Apple isn't beating around the bush:

"When paired with the Apple-designed vapor chamber, A19 Pro enables iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max to deliver up to 40 percent better sustained performance than the previous generation." Obviously, that doesn't mean the A19 Pro is going to be 40% faster than the A18 Pro — that's just not feasible.

What Apple is alluding to is sustained performance; thanks to a new thermal management system that includes a vapor chamber with deionized water, the latest-gen iPhones will be able to do a much better job during extended gaming sessions. Of course, this is something Android phones have been doing for many years now, and it's telling that Apple is also going this route to deliver better performance.

As for actual upgrades, we likely to see anywhere to the tune of a 10 to 15% uptick in CPU performance, and leaked Geekbench results of the iPhone 17 Pro indicate the same. Even if it isn't much in the way of IPC gains as the A19 Pro is clocked higher at 4.26GHz, it's still a decent amount year-over-year, and it's entirely possible the GPU gains will be greater. Efficiency is also a big deal with this generation, with the efficiency cores getting a 50% increase in cache.

What's of particular interest to me is that the A19 Pro once again takes the lead in overall CPU scores; while this was the case for much of the last decade, Qualcomm's switch to a fully custom design allowed it to get an edge over Apple, and this was evident not just in synthetic workloads like Geekbench but real-life usage scenarios.

It's no wonder, then, that the A19 Pro addresses this issue. I'll need to get my hands on the iPhone 17 Pro to test how the single and multi-core workloads measure up against what's available on the best Android phones. Qualcomm and MediaTek are set to announce their next-gen platforms at the end of the month, and it will be interesting to see what they bring to the table.

Another point of differentiation is around AI; the A19 and A19 Pro have Neural Accelerators built into each GPU core designed to deliver up to a 4x increase in compute. Apple is confident enough in its claims that it says the A19 Pro delivers MacBook-level performance when it comes to AI-assisted workloads. That's joined by a new 16-core Neural Engine with increased memory bandwidth.

Although Apple didn't talk too much about AI at the event, it's evident that all phone manufacturers are pushing to increase on-device AI utilities as they introduce powerful NPUs tailored to handle these tasks. Apple Intelligence has potential, but it still isn't at a point where it measures up to what Google is doing on its phones.

There's no question that Google has the edge in this area with the Pixel 10 Pro XL; the phone has a vast suite of meaningful AI utilities, and it continually gets new features, like the image-to-video Veo 3 engine. If anything, AI is foundational to Google's efforts, and the Tensor G5 is designed around the NPU. While the A19 Pro doesn't put as strong an emphasis on the NPU, it's clear that Apple wants to do better in this segment.

With the touted efficiency gains and all the new features coming to the A19 Pro, I'm excited to get my hands on the iPhone 17 Pro models to see how they differ to their predecessors. While we've had several years of similar-looking designs with little increments, the aluminum unibody designs of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max alongside the new internals and tweaks to the imaging make the devices a much more enticing upgrade this year.