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Apple has launched its all-new chip called the A14 Bionic chip. Many devices like the iPhone 12, the iPad Air, the MacBook, and several other future products will be based on this chip. The new iPad Air will be the first to come with an A14 Bionic chip. Apple said that the A14 is the first in the industry ever to create a 5nm chip and is the most powerful chip ever.
The quest to move from a 7nm manufacturing process to a 5nm manufacturing process began in 2019. Yes, Huawei holds the bragging rights of being the first manufacturer to develop a 5nm processor. Now, Apple has joined the league with its next-generation A14 Bionic chip. With the launch of this new chip, we have further info about the CPU, GPU, and many more. So, let’s get right into it.
Apple A14 Bionic Processor
Manufacturing Process
The A14 bionic is made from Silicon and is a TSMC’s manufactured 5nm chip, which makes it more interesting. Though space may be small, it fits 11.8 billion transistors, 39% more than the A13 Bionic (8.5 billion transistors). Because of the small space and more transistors, the chip has become more power efficient and will deliver more performance.
The 7nm+ fabrication on the A13 was a power-consuming one, which resulted in Apple switching to a thicker body with a bigger battery size. However, with 5nm fabrication, we will see better power efficiency with the A14 Bionic chip. There is a downside to this new 5nm fabrication, and that is the cost to achieve it. So rest assured, the price of the upcoming iPhone 12 will likely reach new heights to make up for the manufacturing cost of the new SoC.
CPU
Like the previous chips, the A14 comes with the 6-cores (2+4 configuration) setup, but it is faster than the others. The first two cores are the high-performance cores, and the other four cores are the power-efficient cores. Moreover, the A14 has the high-performance caches for faster multi-tasking. As for the clock speeds, the numbers are not known, but according to a leak, it may come with a maximum frequency of 3.1GHz. Apple claims that the A14 is 40% faster than the A12, which makes it 16% faster than the A13. These are just theories; we can believe it more when we check the performance in real life.
GPU
For the GPU we don’t know much yet, except it is based on a new four-core GPU. The company claims that it will lend a 30% better performance than A12. Today’s generation is focused more on video editing, image editing, and 3D rendering projects, so 30% of the hike will surely deliver better performance. But it’s just 8.3% more than A13 bionic. So, it will be better if you don’t expect much from the GPU.
Neural Engine
The A14 Bionic comes with 16 16-core Neutral engine, which is double that of the previous one. It can now perform 11 trillion operations per second. Furthermore, Apple claims a two times faster Machine Learning performance, which will give 10 times faster ML computational performance than the last generation.
Benchmark
Tipster Ice Universe has shared the Antutu Benchmark test report of A14 Bionic via his Twitter account. Apple’s latest A14 chip has scored 572,333 points in total, which is lesser than Vivo X50 Pro+ powered Snapdragon 865’s 608,396 points and Asus ROG Phone 3 powered Snapdragon 865 Plus’s 629,245 points.
AnTutu scores for Apple chips are usually not good… While I don't know the exact reason, AnTutu takes RAM into consideration too, leading to not-so-good scores for older Bionic chips too.
— Ishan Agarwal (@ishanagarwal24) September 17, 2020
The low number for A14 might be due to unstable software. Tipster Ishan Agarwal said that Antutu scores for Apple chips are usually not good. It looks like AnTutu considers RAM, leading to not-so-good scores for older Bionic chips, too.
Conclusion
Apple specifically works on its processors to develop its software according to the hardware and achieve the highest possible performance through well-optimized software and hardware configurations. What Apple does with this new fabrication method remains a mystery, though, and we will probably have to wait for this year’s iPhone 12 series launch to see this SoC in action.
