On Monday, Apple touted the new iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro as the first iPhones to feature the A18 and A18 Pro chips and be built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence. In a new interview, Apple’s Johnny Srouji provided additional information about the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence, revealing that all four iPhone 16 models will come with 8GB of RAM.
Last year, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus came with 6GB of RAM, while the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max came with 8GB of RAM. This is thought to be one of the reasons why the iPhone 15 Pro smartphones can run Apple Intelligence and the other models cannot. This year, all four iPhone 16 models can run Apple Intelligence. One of the reasons is that all models come with 8GB of RAM.
Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, confirmed the 8GB RAM figure in an interview with Geekerwan. This is the first time Apple has publicly confirmed the amount of RAM in the iPhone 16. Notably, this is a departure from past years, as Apple typically avoids publicly sharing these types of specifications.
During the interview, Srouji explained that Apple Intelligence is one reason for the increased RAM, but noted there are other benefits as well.
“Our goal is to make the best products and provide the best user experience. As it relates to Apple Intelligence, DRAM is one aspect. When you look at what we’re building, whether it’s silicon, hardware or software, we want to be lean in a lot of ways.”
We have a ton of data that tells us how to enable certain features, and Apple Intelligence is one of the very important features that we want to enable. We look at different configurations, both compute and memory bandwidth, memory capacity, and then we make the tradeoffs and balances that actually make the most sense. So Apple Intelligence was the primary feature that led us to believe we needed to go to 8GB.
But having said that, 8GB will be very useful in other applications too, like gaming, high-end gaming, AAA title gaming, high-end gaming on the device, etc. So, I think it will be very beneficial.
The other thing to remember is that one of the benefits of having software and silicon and products fully integrated is that the software team, our amazing software team, not only optimizes the compute, but also optimizes the memory footprint of each application, so you’re not wasting memory.
So we looked at all these tradeoffs and ultimately decided that this made sense and that 8 gigabytes was the most perfect choice for us.”
When asked how Apple Silicon compares to the rest of the industry and why Apple isn’t focusing on increasing core count like its competitors, Srouji explained:
“If you look at the single-threaded performance cores across our silicon, they are the absolute best in the industry. We are leading the industry. If you look at the efficiency cores, they are the absolute best as well. We are leading by a large margin.”
And when we think about what silicon goes into an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, we have a lot of simulation and performance modeling tools, we look at real data, and we take into account, for example, the battery size of the product, the power delivery system of the product, the thermal envelope of the product, because if you overbuild, you create waste.
For example, for a mobile phone, we came to the conclusion that two P4Es, two performance cores for an efficiency core, would meet the requirements we wanted for that device, because we have the best single threads, and the efficiency cores are very good for other tasks, and that configuration works.”
The full interview is definitely worth watching and can be found below: This is one of the best (if not the best) interviews I’ve seen with Srouji so far, and it’s fascinating to watch as Srouji discusses the technical details of Apple Silicon and learn about all of the decisions Apple makes throughout the development process for new products and silicon.
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