Apple A18 Pro vs Intel Core i5-13505H vs Apple A12 Bionic

Apple A18 Pro

The Apple A18 Pro is a powerful smartphone processor and formal successor to the A17 Pro. This new member of the Apple A processor series debuted in September 2024 alongside the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max; it features 2 performance cores and 4 efficient cores along with a 35 TOPS NPU and the 6-core A18 Pro GPU.

The chip is said to be in large part based on the v9.2A ARM microarchitecture for near-Apple M4 IPC. 5G, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3, various satellite navigation systems and NFC are all supported here.

The more affordable A18 SoC has the same 2 P-cores and 4 E-cores running at slightly lower clock speeds along with a significantly slower graphics adapter. The Pro version of the chip also boasts USB 3.x support whereas devices powered by the A18 are limited to USB 2.0 speeds.

Performance

Its multi-thread benchmark scores leave the Dimensity 9300 as well as the Apple A17 Pro and the Apple A18 pretty far behind with at least a 10% advantage. Overall, Apple M1-like performance is to be expected in short-term workloads.

In the meantime, its single-thread performance comes dangerously close to the M3 and M4 chips despite their higher clocks speeds and slightly more advanced architectures. (The A18 Pro's performance cores can run at just slightly over 4.0 GHz, as far as we know.)

Performance drops are inevitable when under longer-term stress since there is no active cooling solution of any kind here.

Graphics

Like any modern graphics adapter, the 6-core A18 Pro GPU is RT-enabled. It delivers benchmark scores that are most comparable to the Immortalis-G720 MP12, Adreno 740 and Adreno 750; as a matter of fact, it even manages to beat the 7-core M1 GPU in many tests which is rather impressive. Any 2024 and 2025 iOS game will be happy with such an iGPU.

Power consumption

It appears the chip is able to briefly consume up to about 10 W when under high load, with average sustained power consumption figures hovering around 4 W.

The pretty modern TSMC N3E manufacturing process makes the A-series chip very power-efficient, as of late 2024.

Intel Core i5-13505H

The Intel Core i5-13505H is a mid-range mobile CPU for laptops based on the Raptor Lake-H series (Alder Lake or Raptor Lake architecture). It was announced in early 2023 and offers 4 of the 6 performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) and all 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores support Hyper-Threading leading to 16 supported threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock rate ranges from 2.6 to 4.7 GHz (single core boost, all core up to 4.6 GHz) on the performance cluster and 1.9 to 3.5 GHz on the efficient cluster. The performance of the E-cores should be similar to old Skylake cores (compare to the Core i7-6700HQ). All cores can use up to 18 MB L3 cache. Similar to the i5-13500H but without vPro support and the 13505H uses a different package and socket.

Performance

Thanks to the higher clock speeds of the improved Intel 7 process, the Core i5-13505H can surpass the old Core i5-12600H (e.g., + 200 MHz boost). The performance should be identical to the Core i5-13500H.

Features

The integrated memory controller supports various memory types up to DDR5-5200 (up from DDR5-4800 of the i5-12500H). The Thread Director (in hardware) can support the operating system to decide which thread to use on the performance or efficient cores for the best performance. For AI tasks, the CPU also integrates GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). Quick Sync in version 8 is the same as in the Rocket Lake CPUs and supports MPEG-2, AVC, VC-1 decode, JPEG, VP8 decode, VP9, HEVC, and AV1 decode in hardware. The CPU now supports PCIe 5.0 x8 for a GPU and two PCIe 4.0 x4 for SSDs.

The integrated graphics card is based on the Xe-architecture and offers 80 of the 96 EUs (Execution Units).

The CPU is rated at 45 W base power (95 W PL2) but most laptops will use a PL1 of around 60 Watt. The SoC is manufactured in a further improved 10nm process at Intel, which is known as Intel 7.

Apple A12 Bionic

The Apple A12 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone Xs and Xr. It was announced late 2018 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. Compared to the previous A11 Bionic, the A12 should offer a 15% improved CPU performance for the performance cores and a 50% lower power consumption for the efficiency cores (both according to Apple).

The chip also includes a new GPU that is advertised as 50% faster, the M12 Motion co-processor and a Neural Engine with 8 cores for up to 5 trillion operations per second.

With 6.9 billion transistors, the A12 Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion). Compared to the A11, the A12 integrates 60% more transistors.