Apple’s iOS 18 is expected to bring a major bump in Neural Engine performance to the iPhone 15 Pro Max and likely the rest of the lineup when it lands this fall.
The iOS 18 beta has been seeded to developers and early benchmarks are showing up to a 25% jump in scores for the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s Neural Engine — impressive considering the fact that Apple Intelligence features require an A17 Pro chip or later.
Spotted by INIYSA, the leaked Geekbench scores show that the iPhone 15 Pro Max running iOS 17.5.1 typically achieves Core ML Neural Engine Inference scores in the low 6000s. But with iOS 18, those scores can jump as high as 7,816.
The performance improvements are attributed to a combination of software and hardware. iOS 18 introduces a new Core ML type called MLTensor that allows for increased performance with multidimensional arrays while still using a familiar API. That, combined with optimizations in iOS 18, will result in noticeable boosts in performance for various machine learning tasks on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, Apple says.
Apple is predicting that iOS 18 will result in iPhone 15 Pro Max-specific boosts in performance for a variety of machine learning models, including MobileNetV3 (2% improvement), ALBERT (66% improvement), SSD MobileViT v2 (700% improvement) and more.