Apple A14 Bionic announcement hints at 'iPhone 12' performance
During Tuesday's iPad and Apple Watch-focused "Time Flies" event, Apple debuted its newest piece of mobile-focused Apple silicon: the A14 Bionic.
Credit: Apple
Apple typically launches new chip generations with iPhone, but no new handsets were to be found at Tuesday's event. Instead, the A14 Bionic was announced alongside the new iPad Air.
The company did take time to detail some of the A14 Bionic's specifications and features, including the fact that it's the industry's first mobile chip to be built on a 5-nanometer production process. Thanks to that new ultra-small production process, the A14 Bionic manages to pack 11.8 billion transistors.
Apple says the A14 Bionic is a 6-core chip that features a 30% boost to CPU performance, and sports a new four-core graphics architecture for a 30% faster graphics boost. That is, however, compared to the previous A12 Bionic included in the iPad Air 3.
As AnandTech points out, that means that the A14 Bionic could be about 16% faster than the A13 Bionic if Apple's metrics are consistent across generations. Applying the same math to graphics yields an 8.3% boost to GPU power.
The A14 Bionic also features a 16-core Neural Engine that's twice as fast as the previous generation and capable of performing up to 11 trillion operations per second, allowing for significant boosts to machine learning. Combined with new CPU-based machine learning accelerators, Apple says machine learning tasks can be up to 10 times faster.
"This combination of the new Neural Engine, CPU machine learning accelerators, and high-performance GPU enables powerful on-device experiences for image recognition, natural language learning, analyzing motion, and more," Apple says.
The company also boasts a new advanced image signal processor, though it didn't give any details about its capabilities. Similarly, Apple didn't reveal whether the A14 Bionic features any significant power efficiency upgrades.
Although first debuted on the iPad Air, the A14 Bionic is largely expected to power upcoming "iPhone 12" and "iPhone 12 Pro" devices.
Credit: Apple
Apple typically launches new chip generations with iPhone, but no new handsets were to be found at Tuesday's event. Instead, the A14 Bionic was announced alongside the new iPad Air.
The company did take time to detail some of the A14 Bionic's specifications and features, including the fact that it's the industry's first mobile chip to be built on a 5-nanometer production process. Thanks to that new ultra-small production process, the A14 Bionic manages to pack 11.8 billion transistors.
Apple says the A14 Bionic is a 6-core chip that features a 30% boost to CPU performance, and sports a new four-core graphics architecture for a 30% faster graphics boost. That is, however, compared to the previous A12 Bionic included in the iPad Air 3.
As AnandTech points out, that means that the A14 Bionic could be about 16% faster than the A13 Bionic if Apple's metrics are consistent across generations. Applying the same math to graphics yields an 8.3% boost to GPU power.
The A14 Bionic also features a 16-core Neural Engine that's twice as fast as the previous generation and capable of performing up to 11 trillion operations per second, allowing for significant boosts to machine learning. Combined with new CPU-based machine learning accelerators, Apple says machine learning tasks can be up to 10 times faster.
"This combination of the new Neural Engine, CPU machine learning accelerators, and high-performance GPU enables powerful on-device experiences for image recognition, natural language learning, analyzing motion, and more," Apple says.
The company also boasts a new advanced image signal processor, though it didn't give any details about its capabilities. Similarly, Apple didn't reveal whether the A14 Bionic features any significant power efficiency upgrades.
Although first debuted on the iPad Air, the A14 Bionic is largely expected to power upcoming "iPhone 12" and "iPhone 12 Pro" devices.
Comments
As Larry already stated, I can't see the Mac having an A14 in it. No A-series chip at all. Apple already has many categories for bespoke chips and already announced a new umbrella category, Apple Silicon.
Apple is saying the A14 in the iPad Air 4 is 40% faster in CPU, 30% faster in GPU and 100% faster in neural versus the A12 in the iPad Air 3. If that is an average increase, than the A14 would score about 1540 in GB5 single, 4000 in GB5 multi, and 6000 in GB5 Metal. Those are awesome scores for this machine.
For comparison, the A13 is 1330, 3360, and 6400 in GB5 single, multi and Metal. The Core i9-10910 in the iMac 5K, the 10-core, scores about 1300 and 9500 in GB5 single and mutli-core. CPU-wise, the iPad Air is an awesome value at its price point.
The GPU score though, is rather mysterious. It's no faster than the A13 in Metal. It's actually a regression. Maybe Apple downclocked the GPU for segmentation? There aren't any technical reasons why it would be slower than the A13.
Apple said Macs will have their own family of chips.
Eventually I see the same chip across the board from Glasses to Mac. That's at least a decade from now.
That Apple uses the A14 in the Air also makes an A14X iPad Pro release in the next months very likely to differentiate the Pro models further.
I also wonder if there is anything about the A14 that Apple hasn't told us yet. The raw performance boost seems less impressive than in the previous years.
I wonder how an 8 performance-core SoC would look, it should easily beat current desktop and even lower end Pro desktop machines.
The graphics are strange, almost as if they’re holding back on consumer products and saving the good stuff for the Pro market. Perhaps this signifies less emphasis on raw compute in favour of dedicated Metal/ray trace logic. Exciting times.
It never made sense to me why they launched flagship silicon in a product that didn’t need it or showcase it well. They should have led with iPads since the iPad Pro was released.
This of course bodes well for the next iPad Pro with A14X.
It bodes even better for the unknown Apple Silicon in the forthcoming AS Macs.
This year, the iPhone delays gave the advantage to an iPad release, especially since Apple will need magnitudes more A14's for iPhones anyway.
As an aside, Apple is likely using all of the production of the 5nm node, excepting that which Qualcomm needs for the X60 modem, both of which are necessary for the iPhone 12 launch. Bad news for competitors.
The original link was to Digitimes,
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/18/iphone-12-x60-5g-modem-digitimes/
like you my gut is telling me that the Mac chips will be different from the A series chips. Granted anything can happen but I would assume it might make sense for there to be a way to describe the line from low end to high end in a digestible way. Adding new letters after the "A" might get confusing once you get up to higher performance Macs. Additionally, higher performance chips will have different thermal envelopes and cooling systems to go along with them and so I assume slightly different architectures? But, at this point anything and everything is up for grabs. That's what I find so exciting this time around. We all have no idea what's going on back there. Once the first Macs with AS are launched it should shed allot of light on how things could look for the rest of the line.