Apple resorted to the old tactic of chip-binning on the iPhone 16e, as the A18 powering its innards is slightly different from the version featured in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, since it features one less GPU core. Unfortunately, this slight difference causes a massive performance delta, with the chipset surprisingly being slower than the A16 Bionic in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited. For those who do not remember, Apple’s A16 Bionic debuted in the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, which are now almost three years old, making it a poor showing of the company’s latest release.
This is the second benchmark focused on the binned A18’s GPU that shows poor performance, potentially diminishing the iPhone 16’s ‘value status’
Earlier, we reported that the binned version of the A18 was 15 percent slower in the Geekbench 6 Metal benchmark compared to the regular SoC. While there would have been a possibility that this was just a one-off, YouTuber Dave2D reveals some disappointing results when running 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited. After completing the test, the 4-core GPU belonging to the A18 obtained a score of 2,882, with the A16 Bionic completing the benchmark with 3,170 points.
For those wanting to know the difference between the binned A18 and non-binned variant, the SoC with a 5-core GPU running in the iPhone 16 finishes the benchmark run with an impressive 4,007 points, making it a massive 28.04 percent variation between the two silicon. It is an eye-opener to witness such a mammoth of a performance drop, which also explains why Apple resorted to chip-binning on the iPhone 16e as it would help bring the price down substantially.
We can imagine that potential buyers will be absolutely livid at seeing the differences in these scores, but the skeptic inside of us continues to prattle that this might be an isolated incident. We are confident that there are several other content creators who got their hands on the iPhone 16e and will be pushing the A18 to its limit. When we come across more 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited results, we will be sure to share those results with you in due time.
