Apple A15 Bionic
At the Apple launch event 2021, Apple brought iPad mini 6, iPhone 13 series, and other new products, which are equipped with the new Apple A15 Bionic processor. According to the official statement, the A15 processor is still based on TSMC’s 5nm process to build a total of more than 15 billion transistors, compared to the previous generation increased by 3.5 billion, a full 30% improvement.
In terms of specifications, the CPU part of the A15 processor is a six-core design, including two large 2-performance cores and four small energy-efficient cores, with performance up to 50% ahead of the competition (compared to Snapdragon 888?).
The GPU part is a 5-core design, one more core than the previous generation A14, but Apple has developed a superb knife skill this time. Only the iPhone 13 Pro and the iPad Mini 6 are equipped with the complete full-featured version, and the GPU of the iPhone 13/13 mini has cut off one GPU core and adopted a quad-core design.
In theory, the iPad Mini 6, iPhone 13 series, and iPhone 13 Pro series equipped with the A15 processor will not have a significant gap in CPU performance, but the iPhone 13/13 Mini’s GPU performance is slightly worse. Of course, the reality is that it has a lot to do with heat dissipation, and in theory, the iPad Mini 6 is better able to bring out the maximum performance of the A15.
The neural network engine has also been upgraded this time, the number of cores is still 16, but the arithmetic power per second has reached 15.8 trillion times, an increase of 34% over the A14, which can run smoothly powerful CoreML, AR modeling.
In addition, officials also claim that the Apple A15 Bionic has cache doubles to 32MB, the system cache capacity, upgraded ISP, display engine, video codec/decoder, and security module, and also added a new lossless compression algorithm, but these are not given too much introduction.
Considering that the A14 has already seen significant overheating and downscaling, the A15 with little process improvement but stronger specifications will theoretically generate more heat, so let’s look forward to the actual performance.
