iOS 18 Improves iPhone’s Neural Engine Performance by 25 Percent, Geekbench Score Suggests

iOS 18 – Apple's latest operating system for the iPhone – appears to be boosting the Neural Engine performance of the handset by as much as 25 percent, according to claims online. The update, announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024 on June 10, is expected to bring several artificial intelligence (AI) features to the iPhone, in addition to other quality-of-life improvements. As part of this AI initiative, it has allegedly given a boost to the handset's Neural Engine.

iOS 18 brings better NPU performance

According to a post by user @lafaiel on X (formerly Twitter), an iPhone 15 Pro Max running iOS 18 scored 7,816 points in the Geekbench ML Score test compared to a score of 6,249 on iOS 17.5.1. This translates into an approximately 25 percent better performance in the handset's machine learning capabilities.

The CoreML Neural Engine Inference was tested in the benchmarks which is responsible for the machine learning tasks on the handset, taking advantage of hardware such as the CPU and the NPU (or in Apple's terms, the Neural Engine). While an NPU works along the same lines as a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), instead of accelerating the graphics, it boosts the neural network operations.

iOS 18 is set to bring several notable upgrades to the iPhone, the centre of which are the new AI capabilities that the company calls “Apple Intelligence”. Courtesy of it, the update will bring system-wide text-generation and summarisation capabilities. The iPhone will also support image generation with the help of a new app called Image Playground. Furthermore, Siri – Apple's voice assistant – is also getting smarter with On-Screen Awareness.

Compatibility

Notably, only the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max powered by the A17 Pro SoC will receive the new AI features across systems. Although Apple has seeded the iOS 18 Developer Beta 1 update to users around the world, Apple Intelligence features will be rolled out later this year and initially only in English (US).

iOS 18 compatibility list includes iPhone XR and later models, up to the iPhone 15 Pro Max.