Apple recently announced its latest iPads and smartwatches at the Time Flies event earlier this week. Of the announced products, the iPad Air 4 was especially interesting as it brings with it Apple’s most powerful chipset to date, the A14 Bionic.
This chipset is also expected to be used in the upcoming iPhone 12 and as such all eyes are on the SoC as it will face off against other flagship chipsets such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Huawei. But if initial reports are to be believed, Apple’s competitors might have an edge over him when it comes to the chipset department.
This is according to information revealed by insider, Ice Universe, who has posted Antutu scores of the A14 Bionic running on Apple’s upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max. According to the report, the cumulative score for the chipset is 572,333, which is much lower than the Asus ROG Phone 3 with Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus, 629,245. In fact, it is also less than the normal Snapdragon 865 that runs on the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra.
If this turns out to be true, it would represent a huge victory for Qualcomm, as it has been losing to Apple in the chipset race in the past. However, at this point, it would also be wise to remember that the score could be low on the iPhone 12 Pro Max because it is not running a final version of the software that could be further optimized to improve performance on the device.
In that case, it is very likely that Apple can get a lot more performance out of the chipset when paired with stable software and device. All of these questions should be answered soon as the iPhone 12 is expected to launch in the coming weeks.
To remind our readers, the A14 Bionic is the first 5nm SoC to make it to a consumer device. Apple claims that the switch to a new 5nm manufacturing process for the A14 Bionic chip has helped it introduce 11.8 billion transistors into the chipset. This, according to Apple, should help it deliver a 40 percent improvement in overall performance and a 30 percent improvement in graphics performance over the A13 Bionic. What’s also interesting, however, is the fact that the switch to this new manufacturing process has allowed Apple to double the number of Neural Engine cores from what we saw in the A13 Bionic SoC.
With the ability to handle 11 trillion operations per second, the iPhone 12 could also gain a significant advantage over the iPhone 11 series when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence-related tasks. While there would be plenty of apps that would benefit from this, the biggest winner here would be Siri, which should work better on the iPhone 12, compared to previous generation iPhones.
