Apple A15 Bionic Mystery - Why No Performance Data?

Apple has announced the iPhone 13 range and a new iPad Mini, all with the new Apple A15 Bionic processor. Built on 5nm and using 15 billion transistors, this should be a power house, but Apple is being very coy about the performance. Has Apple stumbled in its design of the A15?




#garyexplains

[GaryExplains]

For those who are saying things like "this video didn't age well" based on leaked Geekbench scores, can I suggest you re-watch the section where I talk about the counterargument at 05:12. I say that there is likely going to be a 5 to 10% CPU increase based on Apple's claim that it is 50% faster than the competition. To quote me at 06:13, "we will expect the A15 to be better in benchmarks". Please understand what I have said before making silly remarks, it only shows that you didn't understand.

[usama]

There can be many explanations for this meagre performance increase if there is any.
i) What Gary said about their engineers leaving and joining Nuvia
ii) Apple deliberately didn't want to increase the single-core performance as it would be faster than the impending M1x chip which is based on A14
iii) With the increasing demand for manufacturing chips, it would've been easier to just manufacture a similar chip rather than a redesign
iv) Looking at their huge claims about battery, I wouldn't be surprised if they focussed more on efficiency than raw performance.
v) They simply had to make a tradeoff between ISP, Neural engine and CPU and they focused more on the formers

[Fadic]

My guess is that they’re just heavily investing into having a whole new architecture based on ARM V9, expect a big change next or in two years.

[rudeviper]

Its not about apple and Google and Qualcomm and samsung. Its all about engineers. Happy engineers day ❤️❤️❤️

[terribletimes]

I’m more concerned about that higher core GPU in the iPhone 13 Pro. The iPhone 12 series was already bad about thermals. Are they actually going to try with the cooling this time around?

[nabieladrian]

If you lost your team AND your opponent got them, that sounds like a big problem.

[carlomorischi]

The iPhone 13 is very underwhelming: no always on display, no Wi-Fi 6E, no Bluetooth 5.2, no 5G mmWave in Europe, fast charging is still not so fast, no under-display fingerprint reader (that would be really useful in mask times) no LEO satellite emergency communication (that was rumoured), the cinematic video mode shots only at 1080p 30, the processor is not meaningfully faster than last year's one, no new features, and also: where are the new AirPods?
I was planning to upgrade from my iPhone X but it's so underwhelming that I will probably wait another year

[casperes]

I think Apple's goal here was to work on sustained performance. The chip has about the same peak performance, but lower heat output in sustained workloads so it doesn't have to throttle on phones after a while, no screen dimming and such. - That's my guess

[avinashlp]

Love the insights Gary! the presentation looked a bit cheeky, now i understand why :P

[sadiqb]

Your T-shirt Says it all Gary. Cheers!!!

[Tatar_Piano]

Because cpu and gpu are already enough for everything, what matters nowadays are encoders and machine learning for media creation.I think it will be like that for now on, big leaps would only occur with new architecture or smaller manufacturing node

[DameTech]

With “leaked” benchmarks out and knowing how apple followed the same formula for those who remember the iPhone 12 keynote; my bet is there is a 20 to 25% increase in the A15 GPU and 15% increase in CPU for the iPhone 13 Pro (max). I do believe the iPhone 13 will be practically the same in GPU as the iPhone 12 with maybe a slight edge 5% due to its 4 cores.

Just for reference, the iPhone 12 scored a GPU score of 146 peak performance FPS in the Manhattan 3.1 test while the A15 scores a peak performance of 198 FPS. The A14 throttles down to a 119 score and the A15 throttles down between 140 and 150 FPS; which is still relatively higher than A14 peak GPU performance!

However, I will know for sure after I do my own testing for both devices.

[Zel]

i assume A15 is just a little faster than A14. That is why Apple does not present performance comparison like always. Also apple still want to keep M1 as its fastest CPU. So It may not want to improve A chip speed until M1X or M2 release.

[dangrabko]

My take is that Apple has always done a tick tock upgrade cycle. These cores are very similar to the A14/M1 cores, and are on the same process. The A16/M2 on the next generation TSMC process will be a big step forward. Now they have done tweaks to optimize efficiency. Nothing to see here except that they were extremely coy about the performance this time. They didn’t even say until the end that the new iPad mini got the A15!

[EricTheGreat]

Plz- the A14 still smokes every other android chip out even today. A15 isn’t huge gains because it’s an updated process on 5 nm. A14 was already fast enough. A15 brings better battery life with support for 120hz and 5G. 13 Pro Max smokes every other android phone in battery life. It’s not even close.

[ashwani_kumar_rai]

Hi! gary the whatsapp is introducing multi device support where we don’t need our main device to be connected to internet so how will our end to end encryption will work will every device will have diff keys or our keys will be stored on cloud pls elaborate.

[Phaios]

I think there‘s nothing to worry about. It was always like that. They always released a new SOC with a jump in terms of smaller structure (nm) with big power increasements. In the next year they release an SOC with the same nm but slightly tweaked. I think we will see bigger improvements next year with an even smaller structure.

[trancenut]

Lol, I am sure you have eaten the humble pie after Anandtech's article about A15

[kingyogesh]

First benchmark is out the gpu is upto a massive 55% faster the cpu score is still unknown but let’s not pretend that apple dropped the ball or that competition will surpass it it won’t come close …. Update the cpu score is also out we are looking at around 10% single core and around 20% multicore in all we are looking at 55% gpu and 20% cpu improvement overall this soc is 75% faster in raw cpu+gpu I believe apple is comfortably safe from the competition Garry you need to release an updated video asap…. Update single core cpu-1738 multicore-4766 gpu (on the pro models)-14216 metal score how are these numbers “disappointing” ?… update the multicore cpu score is 4818 I bet by the time final product is out we will be hitting close to 5, 000.

[ShushaPogremushkina]

Quite! but what do the extra 4million transistors do then? More bionic power, that is learning/AI? More cache? One need to test the thing before jumping to the conclusion.
People say though that that was the dullest event in years. And perhaps they are right.