Apple’s latest iPhone 13 series includes the new A15 Chip, a Bionic processor that the company claims is 50 percent faster than its competitors. This claim is a bit of a gimmick, but it was the genesis of AnandTech‘s review of the performance efficiency, efficiency, and improvements to the graphics core The review’s findings can be easily confirmed.
In comparison to its competitors In comparison to the competition, in comparison to the competition, A15 isn’t as fast as the competition, as Apple claim, but is more than 62 percent more efficient. Although Apple’s larger cores are more powerful, however, they’re also more efficient in terms of energy consumption.
Two new CPU microarchitectures feature in the A15, both for the two performance cores and the four efficiency cores, which are likely made on a 5nm+ process, which TSMC refers to as N5P, a “performance-enhanced version” of its 5nm process that allows for higher maximum frequencies.
Additionally, AnandTech notes that the system cache of the A15 is now 32MB. That’s twice the cache in the system in comparison to A14. The doubling “dwarfs the competition” and is a “key factor in the power efficiency of the chip, being able to keep memory accesses on the same silicon rather than going out to slower, and more power inefficient DRAM,” is the conclusion of the report.
Apple has also been able to oversee a 50% increase within the cache level 2 in the performance cores. growing by 12MB from the 8MB the latter of which AnandTech describes as “humungous,” as it’s having the same L2 capacity that Apple’s M1 chip, and more than twice as large compared to other designs such as that of the Snapdragon 888. The cache increases help the A15 to achieve “impressive” gains from a performance microarchitecture that isn’t too in any way from last year’s A14 with an additional integer ALU and a more powerful memory subsystem within the efficiency cores add to the performance gains.
Apple’s A15’s A15 cores for performance are remarkable – typically, increases in performance come with an underlying deficit inefficiency. Or at the very least an average efficiency. Apple however has managed to cut power while increasing efficiency, meaning that energy efficiency has been improved by 17% in a high-performance state compared to the A14.
For the A15’s GPU AnandTech declares it “absolutely astonishing,” as it highlights improvements that are far over Apple’s advertising claims. The only criticism that can be found in the report concerns the level of throttled performance on the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro, which AnandTech thinks is due to the latest PCB design.
The design overall iPhone designs for thermals are described as “definitely amongst the worst out there, as it doesn’t do a good job of spreading the heat throughout the body of the phone.” However, despite their limited thermal capacity however, iPhone 13’s iPhone 13 models are “still vastly faster and give out a better gaming experience than competitive phones.”
In short, AnandTech says that the improvements made to the A15 have been “substantial” and believes the efficiency gains will be “key” to the vastly longer battery life that is seen on this model of the iPhone 13 series. “While the A15 isn’t the brute force iteration we’ve become used to from Apple in recent years, it very much comes with substantial generational gains that allow it to be a notably better SoC than the A14.”
