A16 Bionic and A15 Bionic Shares Similarities on Paper, but That Has Not Stopped Apple From Using Newer Cores
Using two high-performance and four power-efficiency cores has been Apple’s approach for the chipset it uses in its iPhones. Its more expensive iPad range now consists of the M1, which sports an 8-core CPU configuration. Since iPads are larger in size, they can accommodate bigger heat spreaders that dissipate that heat effectively, keeping a better temperature check as a result. With the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max featuring the A16 Bionic, Apple does not have the luxury of space. What it does have are resources to further improve upon its iPhone chipsets, which have brought us to this point. The A16 Bionic is mass produced on TSMC’s 4nm architecture, and while that does contribute to Apple’s ‘power efficiency’ goals, using newer cores also achieves that. According to Longhorn on Twitter, the chipset itself is codenamed Crete, while the performance cores are named Everest, with the efficiency ones named Sawtooth.
— Longhorn (@never_released) September 12, 2022 The A15 Bionic has cores named Avalanche and Blizzard, and on top of the naming differences, the performance cores last year could top out at 3.23GHz, and that too in optimized conditions. A16 Bionic’s Everest core can function up to 3.46GHz, which would naturally translate into better performance, as shown in a previous benchmark, where Apple’s latest SoC beat the A15 Bionic with an unrivaled single core score, and 14 percent improved multi-core performance. We have yet to see what GPU cores Apple has used. In our brief comparison, we reported that both the A16 Bionic and A15 Bionic feature the same number of GPU and Neural Engine cores, and as you read, the architectural improvements speak for themselves. More updates are expected to arrive shortly, so we will keep our readers informed in due time. News Source: Longhorn
