The A16 Bionic is Apple’s first custom chip mass-produced on TSMC’s 4nm architecture, which makes it the most cutting-edge technology now being utilized to manufacture it. As such, there are some obvious differences between it and the A15 Bionic, so let’s dive right into the perspective scan details and see what the differences are between the two.
SkyJuice’s analysis of the A16 Bionic is meticulous, and while there’s no exact way to determine the chip area from the video clip, the latest SoC is clearly larger than the A15 Bionic. One reason for this could be the 6% increase in the number of transistors, resulting in higher production costs for the latest chipset as well. Apple’s latest chips use new performance and power-efficient cores, called Everest and Sawtooth, respectively, and the chipset is codenamed, Crete.
The performance core L2 cache on the A16 Bionic has been increased by 33% and is now 16MB compared to 12MB on the A15 Bionic. Increasing the cache size is an easy way to improve energy efficiency because the information is now in close communication with the CPU. The downside is that increasing cache size increases chip size and can increase production costs, with diminishing benefits from cache scaling.
One surprising change to the A16 Bionic chip is the reduction in system-level cache (SLC), from 32MB on the A15 Bionic chip to 24MB. Apple has increased the SLC size twice as much on the A15 Bionic compared to the A14 Bionic, but the analysis does not explain why Apple made this move, though we think it may have something to do with cost, the performance and efficiency cores on the two chipsets have different layouts, with the Everest core appearing to be slightly larger than the A15 Bionic’s Avalanche.
Sawtooth’s chip area has also increased, and so has the total chip size area. one area that seems to be consistent between the A16 Bionic and A15 Bionic is not just the total number of GPU cores, which is five, but their respective sizes. This is surprising because Apple’s latest SoCs for the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max offer significant graphics performance gains, with earlier tests showing a 28 percent increase compared to the A15 Bionic GPU.
The new performance and efficiency cores did not improve as much, gaining only a 14 percent performance boost in multi-core tests. In some ways, the A16 Bionic shares similarities with its predecessor, which could mean the only way to see some comparable differences are when Apple’s 3nm chipset starts arriving, which will likely be next year and is expected to be dedicated to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Rumors say that this 3nm SoC will be called the A17 Bionic, but it’s possible that Apple will use the same technology for the M2 Pro and M2 Max, providing arithmetic power for the updated MacBook Pro models in the fourth quarter of 2022.
