Something interesting was missing from yesterday’s presentation: despite all the time Apple spent talking about the chips, there were no performance comparisons between the iPhone 13 and the iPhone 12.
Normally, Apple tells us how much faster and more powerful the latest iPhone is compared to the previous model, but this time it did not, which led to the conclusion that there is a good reason for this …
Apple told us how much the battery life of the iPhone 13 has improved compared to that of the iPhone 12. It told us that the cameras are much better. It informed us about the smallest notch, new storage levels, new colors, ProMotion screen, new cases and more. But the only performance comparisons were unspecified Android phones.
Macworld ‘s Jason Snell points out that it is unlikely to be an accidental omission.
Here’s something funny about Tuesday’s announcement of the A15 Bionic: Apple didn’t compare its performance to the A14. In the past, Apple has compared the power of its iPhones to previous models. But this year, Apple has chosen to proclaim that the A15 of the iPhone 13 Pro has a graphics performance and a CPU 50% better than the competition.
Given that Apple has generally outperformed its smartphones in terms of processor power, this suggests that the A15 has fewer improvements over the A14 than the Qualcomm processors of major Android phones. . And it makes me wonder if Apple might be trying to gently pedal a new chip that isn’t much faster than the previous model […]
In recent years, each successive generation of chips has offered a 20% improvement in the performance of a core. This year may be different. While the introduction of a new A-Series processor is always a big issue, it’s an open question about the big step the A15 processor will really take.
Semianalysis it puts it even more bluntly, claiming that Apple has lost its best chip engineers and, as a result, is unable to offer the performance improvements it has had in the past.
Apple’s CPU gains stop and the future looks bleak as the impact of the CPU engineer’s exodus on Nuvia and Rivos begins to bleed […]
For years, Apple has received the best CPU cores for consumer workloads. They have, by far, the highest performance per clock and efficiency driven by performance of the same class as the current best CPUs from AMD and Intel. This was driven by dizzying gains with architectural changes every year for a decade.
Now, with the A15, those gains are really slowing down. Apple, in general, was very small compared to the A15 comparison of the newly unveiled iPhone. Instead of comparing it to the previous generation as they usually do, they chose to compare them to ambiguous “competitors”. It’s fine, but we’re a few months away from the new Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek chipsets.
The site then presents evidence that the performance of the A14 and A15 is likely to be nearly identical, based on Apple’s performance claims for the new iPad mini.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the CPU gains are identical from A12 to A14 as from A12 to A15.
He says the likely explanation is brain drain.
SemiAnalysis believes the next-generation kernel was delayed from 2021 to 2022 due to CPU engineer resource issues. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $ 1.4 million. Gerard Williams, Apple’s chief CPU architect, and more than 100 other Apple engineers left to join the company. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc., a new high-performance RISC V startup that includes many of Apple’s top engineers. The brain drain continues and the impacts will be more evident as time goes on. When Apple depleted the resources of Intel and others across the industry, the opposite seems to be happening now.
We believe that Apple had to delay the new generation of CPU cores due to the staff turnover that Apple has experienced. Instead of a new CPU kernel, they use a modified version of last year’s kernel.
The end result seems to be: Don’t buy the iPhone 13 expecting a lot of performance improvements.
FTC: We use auto-affiliate links with revenue. Month.
Watch 9to5Mac on YouTube for more news about Apple: