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Eyebrows were raised during the iPhone 13 keynote when Apple said nothing about the performance gains of the A15, choosing to compare its latest model to its Android competitors rather than the iPhone 12 .
Some have suggested that this indicates very little performance improvement, but new analysis suggests that while the A15 isn’t much different from the A14, Apple still managed to push the chip all the way …
It has long been known that Apple would stick to a 5nm process for the A15 chip powering iPhones this year. Smaller processes are getting harder and harder to do, and even next year’s iPhone lineup is expected to use a slightly smaller version of this year’s chip.
Apple’s 2021 iPhones will stick to a 5nm process, but upgrade to an upgraded ‘5nm +’ version […]
TSMC refers to the 5nm + as N5P and describes it as a performance-enhanced version that will combine greater power with improved energy efficiency to improve battery life (or, as might be more likely with Apple , allow smaller capacity batteries).
The A16 chip should use what is called a process shrinking version or shrinking the 5nm + version. Rather than being an entirely new chip process, this is a way to downsize an existing chip without making major changes to its design. This results in more chips per wafer, which reduces manufacturing costs.
However, a deep dive by AnandTech reveals that Apple has managed to extract some interesting performance gains by pushing the chip harder, running them at higher frequencies.
Micro-architecturally, the A15’s new performance cores don’t look much different from last year’s designs. I haven’t invested the time to look at every nook and cranny of the design yet, but at least the CPU backend is the same in terms of throughput and latency compared to the A14 performance cores. [but …]
Compared to the A14, the new A15 increases the peak single-core frequency of the dual-performance central cluster by 8%, now reaching up to 3240 MHz compared to the 2998 MHz of the previous generation. When both performance cores are active, their operating frequency actually increases by 10%, with both now running at an aggressive 3180 MHz compared to the 2890 MHz of the previous generation.
In general, Apple’s frequency increases here are quite aggressive given that it’s quite difficult to push this performance aspect of a design, especially when we don’t expect major performance gains from the customer. new process node. The A15 is expected to be made on an N5P node variant from TSMC, although neither company is really divulging the exact details of the design.
Apple has also doubled the cache memory of the system.
Looking at our latency tests on the new A15, we can indeed now confirm that the SLC has now doubled up to 32MB, pushing memory depth even further to hit DRAM. Apple’s SLC is likely to be a key factor in the chip’s energy efficiency, being able to keep memory accesses on the same silicon rather than using slower, less power-hungry DRAM.
In addition, the base performance cache has been increased from 8MB to 12MB, while reducing the latency of accessing DRAM.
GPU performance is a mixed bag.
In terms of peak performance, the new A15 GPU is absolutely stunning and again features improvements far beyond Apple’s marketing claims. The new GPU architecture, and possibly the new SLC allow fantastic gains in performance, as well as efficiency.
What’s not so great is the phone’s choke. In particular, we seem to see quite reduced power levels on the iPhone 13 Pro, compared to the iPhone 13 as well as previous generation iPhones.
Considering all the changes, the site’s Andrei Frumasanu concludes that even though it is a smaller jump than usual, the performance gains from the A15 are still worth it.
We are seeing increases in all areas, with absolute performance going from a low of 2.5% to a peak of + 37% […]
Overall, while the A15 isn’t the brute-force iteration we’ve grown accustomed to Apple in recent years, it does come with some substantial generational gains that allow it to be a significantly better SoC than the A14. In the end, it looks like Apple’s SoC team worked well [despite the loss of key chip design talent].
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