Recently, in a foreign technology forum, a player used an active cooling module to dissipate heat for the A18 Pro chip on the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Its single-core and multi-core performance is even comparable to or even better than models equipped with A19 Pro. Test data shows that under active cooling conditions, the GEEKBench5 running score of the iPhone 16 Pro Max equipped with the A18 Pro chip is: the single-core score reaches 3630 points, and the multi-core score is as high as 9648 points.
The iPhone Air equipped with the A19 Pro chip has built-in heat dissipation. The running results are: the single-core score reaches 3687 and the multi-core score is 9390 points. The single-core A19 Pro is only ahead by 57 points, but the multi-core is overtaken by the previous generation A18 Pro by 258 points.
From the comparison, we can see that heat dissipation capacity is crucial to the chip's operation.
Apple’s cooling strategy on the iPhone in recent years has been too conservative.
A18 Pro is based on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process (N3E), which has high potential in terms of architecture and process. However, because the iPhone 16 series still uses the traditional graphite + copper foil heat dissipation solution, it has to significantly reduce the frequency under high load to control the temperature.
On the iPhone 17 series, compared to the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max equipped with VC vapor chambers, the iPhone 17 Air, which only relies on graphene sheets and has extremely weak heat dissipation performance, is completely unable to exert the full performance of the A19 Pro, so that it is surpassed by the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which actively dissipates heat.
Objectively speaking, this is not because the A19 Pro is not strong enough, but because Apple once again chose the former between "extreme thinness and lightness" and "ultimate performance" and used a more stringent temperature control strategy to cover up the heat dissipation shortcomings.