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

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Report: Apple's A15 Bionic has no major CPU improvements, with minimal transistor density gain
During yesterday’s event on California Streaming Apple introduced the A15 Bionic chipset. This component will power all iPhone 13 series phones along with the new one iPad mini. It is manufactured by the world’s largest foundry, TSMC, using its enhanced 5 nm (5NP) process node. The transistor count on the A15 Bionic increased by 27%, to 15 billion transistors compared to the 11.8 billion on the A14 Bionic.
Typically, the higher the density of the transistor, the more powerful and efficient is the consumption of a chip. The density of the transistor, which measures the number of transistors that fit in a square mm, increased by less than 1% in the A15 Bionic despite the jump in the transistor count from 11.8 billion to 15 billion. The density of the A14 Bionic transistor from 134.09 million transistors per square mm increased on the new chip to just 135.14 million transistors per square mm.

Report blames Apple for “brain drain” for launch of new chip with minimal CPU improvements

This small increase in transistor density explains why a new report of The semi-analysis says no major improvements were made to the new chip’s CPU. Instead, it appears that Apple has delayed the release of its next-generation CPU core until next year. “We believe Apple had to slow down the new generation of CPU cores due to the staff turnover that Apple has experienced,” the report says. “Instead of a new CPU core, they use a modified version of last year’s kernel.”

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

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

Typically, Apple mentions the expected performance increase from the new chipset that launches every year on the iPhone. The comparisons the company cited with the iPad mini aren’t very important, as it compares its latest 2021 chip to a three-year-old one. And with the improvements that are made every year to semiconductors, a lot can be changed in three years.

Apple could not give its performance increase expectations for the iPhone 13 line using the Aion Bionic SoC

When the time came for Apple to introduce the iPhone 13 of the series and develop the A15 Bionic, 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 of the Pro units, which it says will offer the best graphics on any smartphone. But Apple never mentioned the improvements we could see with the A15 Bionic in performance and power consumption compared to last year’s A14 Bionic.

The new ISP supports better photo and video algorithms and an improved display engine is needed for the 120M ProMotion screen that updates the screen 120 times per second. The system cache has been doubled to 32 MB and the RAM chip has been upgraded to LPDDR5 from LPDDR4X.

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

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