History repeats itself. Last year, when the Apple A14 Bionic, a new mobile chip, first appeared on the iPad Air 4 instead of a new generation of iPhones, its Geekbench test scores seemed obscenely modest. Humiliated and offended by years of lag, competitors have risen – Apple is over! This time they had a reason for joy much earlier. In February, the same site published test results for something from Apple designated the Apple A15, and unlike last September, they were worse. Then the test results of the previous chip. From the Geekbench site, the results of these tests have disappeared; it looks like someone removed them from the public domain, as well as snapshots of these pages in Geekbench. Apple testers have been pinned down and no longer tweeted. There is nowhere to wait for hints and intricate clues. Let’s try to figure it out without prompts?
First, about the performance tests of an unknown chip’s central processor, supposedly Apple A15, which appeared on the Geekbench website. In what conditions and in what device the chip was tested is unknown. The chip cannot be subjected to Geekbench 5 tests unless installed in some device with an operating system for which there is a Geekbench 5 application. Single-threaded and multi-threaded tests were repeated three times, without interruption.
The mysterious chip’s single-threaded performance is better than any other mobile chip of our time – even better than the Apple A14, but only slightly – by only about 7%. The result of multithreaded tests is disappointing. Yes, the 4320 points scored in them are still more than A14’s 4305, by a fraction of a per cent. And throttling (automatic reduction of the clock frequency when the chip overheats with a decrease in performance) is another reason to assume something bad.
What processor will be in the iPhone 13
The fact that Apple A15 reached the home stretch could be read in at least one newspaper. In China, Time electronics themed app last October. True, the publication reported that Apple began developing the Apple A15 – but we, having some idea of how Apple develops its chips, can easily guess: the chip lit up somewhere because it is already at the finish line and is being produced small lots for testing. It looks like the above results were obtained from one such test. The tested chip was in unfavourable conditions, and nevertheless, it continued to perform tests.
Apple A15 Chip Specifications
The next chip for Apple will also be produced using 5nm technology announced by TSMC back in 2019. Everything goes according to plan. Power consumption will decrease by 15%, and performance will increase slightly. This is if you leave the chip the same as it is now. But year after year, Apple’s chips’ performance is growing, and a halt in this growth or even a slowdown in its pace would allow competitors to catch up or even surpass Apple. Therefore, most likely, the die area will increase, the blocks placed on it will become cooler and more perfect, and Apple will have something to boast about. The performance will increase; if we look at how it has grown in recent years, we can roughly calculate its limits.
Competitors are using more sophisticated and sophisticated configurations of more core types to outflank Apple. Apple confidently squeezes out of the traditional and well-studied Bionic configuration (consisting of two types of cores) with each time more performance; it is assumed that this time everything will be the same. Most likely, the number of CPU cores will not change either. But the graphics and neural processors are waiting for changes.
Observing trends in the growth of single-threaded CPU performance in Apple chips in 2017-2020 (from Apple A9 to Apple A14), analysts suggest that in 2021 this figure should increase to 1850-1900 points. The higher the core performance, the higher the chip’s multi-threaded performance, in the same way the experts calculated the expected performance of the Apple A15. Somewhere in the range of 4600-4800. The GPU performance should be comparable to that of the Apple A12Z or GeForce GTX 980M. The neural processor’s performance should increase from the current 11 TOPS (trillion operations per second) to 15 or 20 TOPS. Everything should be cool. I hope it will.