- Apple introduced the A14 Bionic as the chip that powers the iPad Air.
- It is the industry’s first 5 nanometer silicon and promises significant gains.
- It should be key for the iPhone 12 as well, and could power early Mac ARMs.
When Apple introduced the new iPad Air, it also introduced the A14 Bionic chip that powers the tablet and will most likely sit at the heart of the iPhone 12. But what is it? And what does it mean for the competition? By all indications, it’s a significant improvement over Apple’s previous processing power, and it may well be key in powering the first-generation Mac with internal silicon.
Apple’s A14 Bionic chip, like its iPhone 11 series predecessor A13, has two high-performance cores to handle demanding tasks and four high-efficiency cores to improve battery life. However, the company says that all cores are new and should offer a dramatic 40% performance increase over the previous iPad Air A12 (under unspecified conditions). The increase over the A13 will not be that great (AnandTech calculated 16%), but it should still represent a significant advance.
It does not represent such a significant improvement in graphics performance. There is a new quad-core GPU that is supposed to offer a 30% performance gain over the A12, but that equates to a little over 8% gain over the A13. If you’re expecting the iPhone 12’s A14 Bionic to deliver more intense mobile gaming than its predecessor, you might be disappointed.
Artificial intelligence-driven tasks like photography can be another story. Apple says the A14 Bionic chip has a “next-generation” 16-core neural engine that delivers 11 trillion operations per second, more than double the A12 (5 trillion) and 83% more than the A13 (6 trillion). . There are new accelerators for mobile devices that reportedly deliver up to 10x better machine learning performance. This will only matter in applications that rely heavily on AI, but you will most likely notice the difference.
Read more: The smartphone CPU arms race is heating up again
Apple also mentioned the new image signal processing, although it did not go into details.
The biggest change may simply be how the silicon is made. The A14 Bionic is the first commercially available chip produced using a 5 nanometer process. That should make it considerably denser than 7nm chips like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 Plus, and theoretically improve energy efficiency. Apple didn’t talk about any additional battery life coming from the A14 Bionic, but longevity isn’t usually an issue for tablets like the iPad Air; You will know if there is any profit when the iPhone 12 arrives.
While we’ll have to wait for benchmarks to find out exactly how the A14 fares outside of Apple’s controlled tests, history suggests that the system-on-chip will once again claim an overall performance advantage over the current generation of. chips in Android phones, like the Snapdragon 865 Plus or Samsung’s Exynos 990. Many chips in Android phones include more high-speed cores and might perform better in applications that can exploit them, but that has generally not led to real-world advantages.
Apple’s comparisons with conventional computers could be more revealing. The company claims that the A14 Bionic offers twice the graphics performance of a Windows laptop at its price. Apple clearly expects you to buy an iPad Air rather than a low-end PC, but it’s also setting expectations for the first in-house silicon-based Mac. He wants you to see the A14 as the future of computing, and his appearances on the iPad and iPhone 12 might just be the beginning.
