Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, October 6 (Xinhua)-- Apple launched a new series of iPhone 14 models last month, and 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 suggests that the chip, which is thought to be "squeezing toothpaste", may be less different than Apple wants to imply to users.

Macworld's Jason Cross delved into the design of the A16 chip and claimed that it was basically the same as the A15. Compared with Apple's iPhone chip upgrades in previous years, the difference between A15 and A16 is much more limited.

We have noticed before that Apple calls the A16 chip the 4nm chip, while TSMC calls it the enhanced version of the 5nm process, which should actually be expressed as N4, but it essentially belongs to the 5nm family, and there is no big difference in performance, of which the main improvement is due to high frequency.

At present, the overall data of A16 is the same as that of A15: 2 high-performance cores, 4 efficient cores, 5 GPU cores and 16 neuroengine cores. The number of transistors has increased, but only from 15 billion to nearly 16 billion-much less than usual.

Jason Cross said that its CPU and neural engine architecture seems to be exactly the same as the A15, which is equivalent to Apple's high-frequency A15 built with N4. The biggest difference is the upgrade from LPDDR4x memory to LPDDR5 memory, but there are only slight differences in other aspects, which can also be reflected in the benchmark.

Given that the CPU architecture has not changed much, but is running at a higher frequency (and more memory bandwidth is available), we should expect most CPU benchmarks to show a 10% or less performance improvement.

A quick look at the Geekbench 5 data shows that, indeed, the maximum single-core CPU performance seems to be about 8-10% better than the A15. Multicore performance is slightly better, but these advantages may come from overwhelming cache enhancements, which are sensitive areas of the chip after all.

A 7% to 19% increase in GPU performance is expected if the architecture remains the same, but given the increase in the frequency of A16, the performance improvement is basically in line with the 50% increase in memory bandwidth provided by LPDDR5 memory.

In his view, the A16 chip is essentially an incremental improvement to the A15, similar to the A15, which explains why the basic iPhone 14 has "functions such as action mode, photon engine and 4K movie mode".

CTOnews.com learned that according to Apple's official introduction, the A16 bionic chip, a 6-core CPU composed of two high-performance cores and four energy-efficient cores, can increase the speed to up to 40%. With an accelerated 5-core image processor, the memory bandwidth is increased by as much as 50%, which is ideal for running graphics-intensive games and App, while the new 16-core neural network engine has a processing capacity of up to 17 trillion operations per second. The chip provides higher performance with extremely low power consumption, resulting in round-the-clock battery life.

"the running score of Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max in Geekbench,A16 bionic chip is slightly higher than that of A15"

"Apple iPhone 14 Pro series A16 bionic chip running score re-exposed: multi-core performance, as high as 5455 points."

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