On September 15, 2020, Apple introduced its A14 Bionic chip in an event. It is first seen in iPad air, not in the iPhone 12 series. They introduced it ahead of the iPhone 12 launch. Which seems to raise expectations of iPhone fans for what level of power they can get from it. So now, let’s talk about how powerful it is in 2020.
“Our goal is to build chips with industry-leading performance, powerful custom technologies, and extremely efficient use of energy to make every one of our products best in class.”
– Tim Millet
VP, Platform Architecture
The A14 Bionic chip is the first in the industry to use the breakthrough 5-nanometer process technology. Tim said, “The incredibly small scale of this process challenges the laws of physics”. The size of the transistor is 5-nanometer and is very small that the dimensions of them are measured in atoms. This made them able to pack 11.8 billion transistors into A14. Compared to their previous 7-nanometer chip, that is an increase of 40%.
CPU
A14 Bionic includes a big update to the CPU. It got 6 cores in it, 4 of high power efficiency cores, and 2 of high-performance cores. And it integrates large, high-performance caches sized to meet the need of most demanding applications. This time Apple concentrated on both the power efficiency and performance to deliver the 40% faster CPU with the usage of lesser power possible. The CPU is optimized with 2nd generation ML accelerators to perform 10 times faster ML computations compared to the previous CPU.
GPU
A14 features the newest GPU architecture. Scaled to deliver more sustainable performance at the lowest possible power. It has a new 4-core design that increases 30% in graphics performance. When the iPad’s A14 compared to the best selling laptop in the price range, the iPad has up to 2 times faster graphic performance, Tim said. Either editing 4K videos or playing immersive games, iPad air’s A14 can handle them with ease.
Neural Engine
A14 is loaded with multiple custom technologies like a powerful Neural Engine. This time, they doubled up the cores making it a 16-core Neural Engine to make it more powerful for machine learning. The A14 with 16-core Neural Engine is capable of executing 11 trillion operations per second. This Neural Engine with ML accelerators in CPU that we discussed above can deliver blazing-fast ML capabilities. That can help elevate apps built on Core ML with a better performance.
So that’s the A14 Bionic Chip to deliver the best CPU and GPU performances and machine learning capabilities. That’s a big performance and Efficiency jump; Making iPad air far better than the previous. Also, making it the best chipset introduced so far in 2020. The question is “How powerful this will be if it’s in an iPhone?” Obviously, that’ll make a big performance jump there too with iOS 14 and A14 Bionic Chip. Let’s just wait for its launch and the day is no far.
| ALSO READ: | Apple September Event 2020: Everything you need to know |
Here where you can stream the complete event: https://www.apple.com/apple-events/september-2020/
So that’s it for now. Thanks for reading and please do share if you found this article informative. Also, keep an eye on this space while you stay home safe to get more updates regarding this. Hope we see you around.