With the launch of the iPhone 12 getting closer, leaks surrounding Apple’s upcoming phones are emerging with increasing frequency. Now, an image is spinning that could give us our first look at the same silicon that will power Apple’s upcoming flagships.
The image comes from a filter called Mr · white on Twitter, and shows a group of chips marked A14 from top to bottom. We can’t talk about the legitimacy of the image, of course, it could have been easily tweaked, although it did days after chip maker TSMC revealed that it is currently producing 5-nanometer chips for a device to be released in the fall, which it is most likely the iPhone 12.
The best CPUs you can get on phones today, Apple’s A13 Bionic and Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 (as well as its slightly faster new 865 Plus variant) are 7nm chips. Shrinking a chip by even a nanometer or two makes it simultaneously faster and more energy efficient, and that’s precisely what Apple is expected to have done for the A14 Bionic.
In fact, TSMC says this 5nm chip in question “is about 15% faster, but uses 30% lower power than the current 7nm node found in the Snapdragon 865 Plus or Apple A13.” That should mean wonderful things for battery life and longevity on a charge, particularly in these times when phones have more power demands than ever, among 5G modems, high refresh rate OLED displays, and other features.
A14 pic.twitter.com/kCkrCHrzmX19 July 2020
The other advantage that Apple enjoys with its chips is ubiquity. The A14 will hit every phone Cupertino launches from now until the end of the year, which means all iPhone 12 models, from the entry-level 5.4-inch phone, believed to start in the $ 700 neighborhood Up to the upper range, 6.8 -inch iPhone 12 Pro Max well north of quad digits – will benefit from the same class-leading performance.
In March, a Geekbench listing for the A14 allegedly leaked online. Benchmarks like this are pretty easy to fake, though the list put the A14’s multi-core score at 4,612 points which, as AppleInsider notes, is even better than the 4,568-point score of the A12X processor on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
So as usual, Apple’s next A-series chip is shaping up to be a beast. The upcoming iPhone 12 range will reportedly employ 4GB of RAM to go with it on standard models and 6GB for Pro variants, which can also get 120Hz refresh rate displays, a LiDAR sensor for augmented reality applications. Enhanced and mmWave 5G connectivity.
Benchmarks for the newly created Snapdragon 865 Plus, which will power upcoming performance-minded Android phones like the Asus ROG Phone 3, remain a mystery, though we don’t expect them to outperform the leaked A14 numbers if they’re really true. For what it’s worth, the OnePlus 8 Pro, which uses a standard Snapdragon 865, scored 3,517 points in Geekbench 5.
We hope to put the A14 Bionic to the test, and all that the iPhone 12 line has to offer, through its footsteps in the coming months, once we get our hands on the phones.
