Apple launched its new iPhone 14 series last month, and one of the differences between the base model and the Pro model is the chip, as only the latter has the latest A16 chip. But a new study today suggests that the chip, which is considered “toothpaste”, maybe even less different than Apple is trying to imply to users.
Macworld’s Jason Cross has delved into the design of the A16 chip, claiming it’s essentially the same as the A15. The differences between the A15 and A16 are much more limited than in previous years of Apple’s iPhone chip upgrades…
As we’ve noted before, Apple refers to the A16 chip as a 4nm chip, while TSMC refers to it as an enhanced version of the 5nm process, which should really be referred to as N4, but it’s essentially in the same 5nm family and the performance differences aren’t too unexpected, with the main boost coming thanks to the higher main frequency.
So far, the overall figures for A16 are the same as for 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 almost 16 billion – a much smaller boost than usual.
Jason Cross says the CPU and neural engine architecture appears to be identical to that of the A15, which is Apple’s high-frequency version of the A15 built with the N4, with the biggest difference being the upgrade from LPDDR4x to LPDDR5 memory, but otherwise, there are only minor differences, which can be reflected in the benchmarks.
“Given that the CPU architecture hasn’t changed much, just running at a higher main frequency (and with more available memory bandwidth), we should expect most CPU benchmarks to show a performance increase of 10% or less.
A quick look at the Geekbench 5 data shows that this is indeed the case, with the maximum single-core CPU performance appearing to improve by around 8-10% over the A15. Multi-core performance is a little better, but these benefits may come from an overwhelming cache boost, which is after all a sensitive area of the chip.”
If the architecture remains unchanged, the GPU performance improvement of 7% to 19% is still in line with expectations, but given the increased frequency of the A16, the performance improvement could essentially be in line with the 50% increase in memory bandwidth offered by LPDDR5 memory.
He believes that the A16 chip is essentially an incremental improvement on the A15, similar to the A15+, which explains the iPhone 14 base model’s “features such as Action Mode, Photon Engine and 4K Movie Mode”.
Apple’s official description says the A16 Bionic chip is made up of two high-performance cores and four power-efficient cores with a 6-core central processor that brings up to 40 percent faster, an accelerated 5-core image processor with up to 50 percent more memory bandwidth, making it ideal for running graphics-intensive games and apps, and a new 16-core neural network engine with the processing power of up to 17 trillion operations per second. With 17 trillion operations per second, this chip delivers higher performance at very low power consumption for all-day battery life.
