Very clever when it comes to touting its new products and the merits of their latest processors, Apple could have gone a little too far with the A16 Bionic chip of the iPhone 14 Pro. According to tests by the specialized site MacWorld, this “new” SoC is actually not that different from the old one.
Installed on board the iPhone 14 Pro on the top of the range, the A16 Bionic chip is lacking in the “classic” iPhone 14s, which for their part have to be satisfied with the same A15 Bionic chip as the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro last year. This is the first time that Apple has equipped its new iPhones differently in terms of processor… but if you have opted for an iPhone 14, rest assured, you will not lose so much with its A15 Bionic.
The tests carried out by the specialized site MacWorld indeed establish that the A16 Bionic chip is far from being as innovative as Apple wants to say. Based on MacWorld’s findings, 9to5Mac notes as well as the differences [entre l’A15 et l’A16] are much more limited than is normally the case for the annual iPhone SoC update “.
The A16 Bionic is based on a “false” 4 nm engraving
In detail, Apple seems to have had a little too much fun on the marketing front, starting by announcing that its SoC A16 was engraved in 4 nm by TSMC. If the chip is based on the N4 process of the Taiwanese founder, he himself does not go so far as to speak of engraving in 4 nm. TSMC, for its part, speaks of a ” improved version of N5 technology»…include a fine-tuned 5nm etch.
The choice of this burning protocol not so different from the old one (even if it remains one of the most advanced on the market at this stage, Samsung Foundry having indeed just started to burn chips in 3 nm GAA), partly explains the shy performance gap observed between the A16 Bionic and its predecessor still used by the iPhone 14.
The technical specifications of the two chips are also essentially identical: the A16 indeed incorporates two high-performance cores, four high-efficiency cores, five graphics cores and 16 cores dedicated to the Neural Engine. The main difference comes from the number of transistors, which has indeed been revised upwards on the A16, with an increase from 15 to 16 billion.
A gain which remains however reduced compared to what could be observed on previous generations of Bionic chips. For comparison, the A14 chip was equipped with 11.8 billion transistors, against 8.5 billion on the A13 Bionic. The lack of technological breakthrough on the A16 Bionic is somehow “quantifiable”.
The A16 chip? An A15 chip overclocked… and sprinkled with LPDDR5
According toMacWorld, the A15 and the A16 also share a common or almost common CPU architecture. The improvement in CPU performance of the A16 therefore comes mainly, according to the specialized site, from an increase in frequencies and the switch to LPDDR5 memory (instead of the LPDDR4X used by the A15).
These modest developments do not allow the A16 Bionic to take a big lead over the A15 in the benchmarks. In terms of CPU, MacWorld indeed notes a difference of only 8 to 10% in favor of the A16, with a slightly more marked advantage for the latter in multi-core calculation.
However, the performance gain is greater on the GPU side, with 7 to 19% improvement in favor of the A16. Here too, the increase in frequencies noted byMacWorlddoes the trick to inflate the balance sheet of Apple’s new chip a little, which, on the other hand, benefits, unsurprisingly, from a real advantage in terms of memory bandwidth: +50% thanks to the adoption of LPDDR5 .
Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max feature a new chip: the Apple A16 Bionic. This brings many improvements, both in terms of performance, but also for photos.
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