iPhone 16e has a binned A18 chip

iPhone 16e has a binned A18 chip

The brand-new iPhone 16e is the fourth and least expensive member of the iPhone 16 series. Reaching the $599/€699/£599 starting price required some resourcefulness and it’s now confirmed that the A18 chip inside the 16e is not on par with the one used in the regular iPhone 16.

As per the official specs from Apple, the 16e’s A18 chip features a 6-core CPU (2 performance and 4 efficiency) alongside a 4-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine. While the CPU and Neural core count is the same as the regular A18 chip, the GPU on the 16e gets one less core. This is not likely to be a noticeable difference in real-world performance but will likely show up in benchmarks and more demanding gaming titles.

Chip binning is a common quality control process in the semiconductor industry as yields are never 100% and some chips don’t reach the desired core count or clock speeds. Instead of throwing these chips out, most manufacturers separate them into different bins (hence the name) and disable certain cores. Those binned chips are then sold at lower prices.

The binned A18 chip features one less GPU core than the A18 chip on the iPhone 16 and two cores fewer than the iPhone 16 Pro/Max’s A18 Pro. This situation is similar to the iPad mini (2024) which features a binned version of the A17 Pro chip which again has one less GPU core.

For more details on the iPhone 16e, check out our announcement coverage which details everything there is to know about the newest iPhone member.