Though details were scant, Apple introduced several new chips at its “Awe Dropping” iPhone 17 event on Tuesday. There were new A-series processors as expected: the A19 in the iPhone 17 and A19 Pro in the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro. But Apple also quickly announced a new C1X cellular modem and N1 network processor.
We have limited information about these new chips, but here’s what we know so far.
A19 and A19 Pro
The A19 appears only in a single phone, the iPhone 17. Apple says it is made with ”the most advanced 3nm technology,” which probably means TSMC’s latest N3P process. As with the A18, it’s got 6 CPU cores (2 performance, 4 efficiency) and 5 GPU cores.
It’s hard to tell what’s actually improved, and by how much. A new display engine is necessary for ProMotion and always-on display, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen in other Apple chips for years.
Apple
The 5-core GPU is “a big step up,” according to Apple, with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and MetalFX upscaling. Frankly, it sounds like the GPU cores of the A18 Pro. Apple says the GPU will be 20 percent faster than the A18. The Neural Engine is also “improved,” but other than increased memory bandwidth, Apple doesn’t get into specifics.
Things get a little more interesting with the A19 Pro, which is found in the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.
The performance cores have better front-end bandwidth and branch prediction, making it “the fastest CPU in any smartphone,” according to Apple. Leaked Geekbench scores show a single-core score of nearly 3,900, which is indeed a record and 300-400 points higher than A18 Pro (around 10 percent faster).
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The efficiency cores have 50 percent more cache, which should improve power efficiency (any time you can grab data from cache, you avoid fetching it from RAM, which uses more power).
The GPU gets some big upgrades, too. It’s got five cores in the iPhone Air and six cores in the iPhone 17 Pro, but the cores are improved a lot over the A18 Pro’s GPU. Each has improvements to compression, dynamic caching, and double the 16-bit floating point math rate. There are also new “Neural Accelerators” in the GPU cores, which triple the peak compute as the A18 Pro’s GPU cores for the kinds of operations used often in AI and Machine Learning.
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That’s in addition to the improved Neural Engine and the Machine Learning accelerators in the CPU cores. Apple said it provides “MacBook Pro levels of compute in an iPhone,” and while no specific MacBook Pro model was mentioned, it’s a big claim.
Apple said the A19 Pro has “even more memory” than the A18 Pro, which means the rumors of those phones having 12GB of RAM are probably true.
The upgraded C1X modem
While introducing the iPhone Air, we got a genuine surprise: Apple announced that it uses a new upgraded version of the C1 modem, called C1X.
Apple’s first 5G modem, the C1, was introduced in the iPhone 16e this spring. Now, half a year later, Apple has an update that it says is “up to 2x faster.” Apple also says that it’s faster than the modem in the iPhone 16 Pro “for the same cellular technologies” while using 30 percent less overall power, which sound like a phrase meant to weasel its way out of losing some performance comparisons.
We don’t know if the other iPhone 17 models have newer Qualcomm modems than the one found in last year’s models, but the C1 was roughly on par with those with the exception of lacking mmWave support. It was better in certain situations and worse in others, very much dependent on carrier and location.
Apple
The Qualcomm modem in the iPhone 16 line was not the company’s top-of-the-line offering, so the C1 holding its own in many situations is not as impressive as it might otherwise be. But for Apple to have an update with up to double the performance and more power efficiency in less than a year is quite a feat.
N1 wireless networking
The iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone Air all use a new Apple-designed wireless networking chip called N1, which enables Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread networking. This makes these the first Apple devices with Bluetooth 6.
Beyond that, we don’t know much about it. There are no performance or efficiency claims, really. Apple says it “improves overall performance and reliability in key areas like Personal Hotspot and AirDrop.” There are a lot of qualifiers in that sentence, so it’s best to reserve judgment on the N1 chip until there are some good independent tests.
Still, Apple is full speed ahead on taking the entire wireless stack under its control, and it’s nice to see that it it’s coming right out of the gate with support for the latest standards.
Author: Jason Cross, Senior Editor, Macworld
Jason has written about technology for more than 25 years - first in the gaming press, then focusing on enthusiast PCs and general technology. He enjoys learning how complicated technology works and explaining it in a way anyone can understand.