A16 from iPhone 14 Pro is slightly different from A15 ›Macerkopf

In addition to the new Always On Display and Dynamic Island, the new A16 chip is one of the biggest innovations in the iPhone 14 Pro models. But how new is the A16 Bionic actually? Is it yet? MacworldThe new chip is slightly different from its predecessor.

What has changed compared to the A15 Bionic chip?

In the wake of the iPhone 14 generation, Apple is using the A-series chip as a differentiator between the Standard and Pro models for the first time. The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max will get the new A16 chip, while the iPhone 14 and Plus will get the A15 chip from last year’s models. This decision is likely part of Apple’s strategy to segment products further.

Jason Cross of Macworld has now looked at the design of the A16 chip and found that it is mostly identical to the A15 chip. At the launch of the iPhone 14, experts noted that Apple likes to refer to the A16 chip as a 4nm chip, while TSMC – the chip manufacturer – is talking about an improved 5nm process.

Cross takes this point:

According to Apple, the chip was manufactured by TSMC in a new 4nm process, making it the first such processor in a smartphone. However, it should be noted that TSMC’s “N4” process is not actually a 4nm process. TSMC describes it as an “improved version of N5 technology”. Although it is a more advanced process than previous A-series chips, it is not a true next-generation silicon manufacturing process.”

The number of transistors increased, but only from 15 billion to 16 billion – a much smaller jump than usual. Other key data is the same as the A15: 2 high-performance cores, 4 efficiency cores, 5 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores.

Cross notes that both the CPU and the Neural Engine have an identical or nearly identical architecture to the A15. However, benchmarks emphasized an improvement in performance. The fact that Apple was able to improve the already fast A15 again is likely due to the increased clock rate. In addition, Apple now uses LPDDR5 instead of LPDDR4x memory. Cross explains:

“Because the CPU architecture hasn’t changed much, only running at 7 percent higher clock speed (and we have more memory bandwidth), we should expect most CPU benchmarks to show or show a 10 percent performance increase. less.

A quick look at the Geekbench 5 numbers shows us that the maximum single-core CPU performance appears to have increased by about 8 to 10 percent compared to the A15. Multi-core performance is a bit better, but it is possible that these tests can make better use of the chip’s caches and thus take advantage of the increased memory bandwidth. “

The fact that the A16 chip is just an incremental improvement over the A15 chip explains why the base iPhone 14 model along with the A15 also gets new features like Photonic Engine, Action and 4K Cinema. This shows that Apple SoCs (system on a chip) have now reached a level where you don’t have to worry about chip upgrades. Even the next step of the 3nm process will not turn the world upside down, although there is no doubt that focusing on efficiency will make an already very good chip even better in the future.