Apple launched a new iPhone 14 series model last month. One of the differences between the basic model and the Pro model is the chip because only the latter has the latest A16 chip. But a new study today argues that the chip, which is thought to "squeeze toothpaste," may be less of a difference than Apple wants to suggest to users.
Macworld's Jason Cross took a deep dive into the design of the A16 chip, claiming it's basically the same as the A15. Compared to Apple's previous iPhone chip upgrades, the differences between the A15 and A16 are much more limited...
We have noticed before that Apple calls the A16 chip a 4nm chip, while TSMC calls it an enhanced version of the 5nm process, which should actually be represented by N4, but it essentially belongs to the 5nm family, and there is not much difference in performance. A big surprise, the most important improvement is due to the high frequency.
At present, the overall data of the A16 is the same as that of the A15: 2 high-performance cores, 4 high-efficiency cores, 5 GPU cores, and 16 neural engine cores. The number of transistors has increased, but only from 15 billion to nearly 16 billion a much smaller increase than usual.
Jason Cross said that the architecture of its CPU and the neural engine seems to be exactly the same as that of the A15, which is equivalent to the high-frequency version of the A15 made by Apple with N4. The biggest difference is the upgrade from LPDDR4x memory to LPDDR5 memory, but there are only subtle differences in other aspects. , which can also be reflected in benchmarks.
Given that the CPU architecture hasn't changed much, just running at a higher clock speed (and with more memory bandwidth available), we should expect most CPU benchmarks to show a performance gain of 10% or less.
A quick look at the Geekbench 5 data shows that it is, and the maximum single-core CPU performance seems to be about 8-10% better than the A15. Multi-core performance is slightly better, but these advantages may come from the overwhelming cache boost, which is a sensitive area of the chip after all.
If the architecture remains unchanged, the GPU performance increase of 7% to 19% is still in line with expectations, but considering the increase in the A16 frequency, the performance improvement can basically reach the same 50% memory bandwidth improvement provided by LPDDR5 memory.
He believes that the A16 chip is essentially just an incremental improvement to the A15, similar to the A15+, which explains that the iPhone 14 base model has "features such as action mode, photon engine, and 4K movie mode."
Apple's official introduction said that the A16 bionic chip consists of two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. Graphics processor with up to 50% more memory bandwidth, ideal for running graphics-intensive games and apps, and a new 16-core neural network engine capable of processing up to 17 trillion operations per second Provides higher performance in low conditions for all-day battery life.
0 Comments