Report: Apple’s A15 Bionic has no major processor improvements, minimal gain in transistor density

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At yesterday’s California Streaming event Apple introduced the A15 Bionic chipset. This component will power all iPhone 13 series handsets as well as the new ipad mini. It is manufactured by the world’s largest foundry, TSMC, using its improved 5nm (5NP) processing node. The number of transistors on the A15 Bionic increased by 27% to 15 billion transistors, compared to 11.8 billion on the A14 Bionic.

As a rule of thumb, the higher the density of transistors, the more powerful and energy efficient a chip. Transistor density, which measures the number of transistors that fit into a square millimeter, increased by less than 1% on the A15 Bionic despite the jump in the number of transistors from 11.8 billion to 15 billion. The A14 Bionic’s transistor density of 134.09 million transistors per square millimeter on the new chip has increased to just 135.14 million transistors per square millimeter.

Report accuses Apple of ‘brain drain’ over new chip launch with minimal processor improvements

This small increase in transistor density explains why a new ratio of The semi-analysis indicates that no major improvements have been made to the processor of the new chip. Instead, it looks like Apple has delayed the release of its next-gen processor core until next year. “We believe Apple must have delayed the next generation of processor cores due to all the turnover Apple has experienced,” the report said. “Instead of a new processor core, they’re using a modified version of last year’s core.”

The report adds that Apple has suffered a “brain drain” as the company recently lost a number of key employees, including the man who designed the company’s A-series chips from the A7 to the A12X, Gerard Williams III. “Apple is clearly investing its transistor budget in the non-CPU aspects of the SoC,” said Semianalysis.

The A15 Bionic has 27% more transistors than the A14 but has less than 1% gain in transistor density

And while Apple cited a 40% performance improvement for the new sixth-generation iPad mini that will be equipped with the A15 Bionic, that covers the improvement of the A12 Bionic chip that was used with the iPad mini. fifth generation. The new chip is also responsible for the 80% increase in GPU performance seen with the new iPad mini.

Apple generally mentions the performance improvement to be expected from the new chipset it launches in the iPhone every year. The comparisons the company cited with the iPad mini aren’t that big of a deal since it compares its latest 2021 chip with one that’s three years old. And with the improvements made to semiconductors every year, a lot can change in three years.

Apple has fallen short of its expectations of boosting the performance of the iPhone 13 line using the A15 Bionic SoC

When the time came for Apple to unveil the iPhone 13 series and unbox the A15 Bionic, he discussed the 15.8 trillion operations per second the chip can handle, 44% more than the 11 trillion operations per second the A14 Bionic could do. Apple also mentioned the five-core GPU on the Pro units which it says will deliver the best graphics on any smartphone. But Apple never mentioned the improvements we could see with the A15 Bionic in terms of performance and power consumption compared to last year’s A14 Bionic.

The new ISP supports better photo and video algorithms and the improved display engine is required for the 120Hz ProMotion display which updates the display 120 times per second. The system cache doubled to 32MB and the RAM chip was upgraded to LPDDR5 from LPDDR4X.

Why Apple’s silence? According to SemiAnalysis, this was an intentional act by Apple. Instead of saying the A15 Bionic’s processor was 50% faster than last year’s A14 Bionic, Apple said the new chip’s processor was 50% faster than the competition, a an anonymous semiconductor group of chip designers like MediaTek, Samsung and Qualcomm. And the old chips used in Apple’s comparison will soon be replaced by faster chips from the “competition.”

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