Apple

Apple A16 Bionic is the new chipset from the Cupertina

Riya Shukla

Sep 10,2022
3 min read
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686 Views

At its ‘Far Out’ hardware launch event, Apple unveiled its latest generation of iPhones today. The company announced the iPhone 14, the iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and the iPhone 14 Pro Max. While the former two bring minor upgrades over the previous-gen iPhone 13 series, the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro Max feature a new pill-shaped notch, a 48MP triple camera setup, and other cool upgrades.

Now, Apple only announced the US pricing of the four new iPhone models, which starts at $799, at the launch event. Now, in true Apple fashion, the company did not share the screen size on the stage, so you will have to wait for the product page.

Apple is once again embarrassing Android chipset makers, equipping the iPhone 14 with the A16 Bionic delivering a level of performance expected more from laptop and desktop PC systems.

If we delve into the CPU, the new A16 Bionic includes 6 cores (with a 2 + 4 distribution), which are divided into 2 high-performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores. As usual, Apple does not provide more details such as frequencies or cache, but we will surely see them later with the first benchmarks.

The Neural Engine dedicated to Artificial Intelligence has also been improved on the Apple A16 Bionic. Recall that last year’s model was capable of performing 15.8 trillion operations per second, while this year it increases to 17 trillion operations per second.

Right from the unveiling event, Apple announced that the new A16 Bionic chipset delivers more performance and at a fraction of the power consumption seen in competing products. And the claim appears to be true, with unofficial performance tests posted to the popular Geekbench online archive showing a consistent performance boost for the iPhone 14 Pro.

If we talk about the GPU, the A16 Bionic includes a 5-core with frequencies that have not been revealed at the event. Equally, has 50% more memory bandwidth compared to the previous A15 Bionic. Also ISP or Image Signal Processor has been upgraded in the new Apple SoC. This small chip (ISP) works together with the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine, being capable of processing up to 4 trillion operations per photo.

Thus, the iPhone 14 Pro reportedly scored 1879 points in the Geekbench 5 single-core test and 4664 points in the multi-core test. By comparison, the predecessor flagship model, the iPhone 13 Pro Max, manages to score 1734 points in the single-core test and 4818 points in the multi-core test.

In the Android camp the situation looks much worse, with Qualcomm’s most powerful chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, scoring just 1304 points in the single-core test and 3782 points in the multi-core. Before we praise the new A16 Bionic too much, it must be said that Apple also held a considerable performance advantage with the predecessor A15, already positioned well ahead of the competition in the Android camp.

Thus, the A16 Bionic looks more like an optimized version of the A15 than an entirely new chipset. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the performance displayed will be confirmed from multiple sources, with the possibility that the iPhone 14 Pro example under test is a pre-production version, with specifications and firmware optimizations not yet finalized.

In other words, the retail version of the phone could be even more powerful than that, outlining a considerable performance leap over both other Android phones and the previous iPhone version.