iPhone 12’s A14 Bionic Chip: The Most Powerful Mobile SoC Ever Made by Apple
Apple reveals the first and the most advanced 5nm a14 bionic processor for iPhone 12 and iPad Air
Here we see how Apple announced a new chip, the Apple A14 Bionic Chip with improvements in both AI and CPU and GPU performance. It is something common that the company tends to show in presentations and what it takes to heart. The A14 Bionic chip has been manufactured in a 5nm process, making it the first chip for mobile devices built in a sub-7nm process. In practice, this means that the power consumption of the chip will be less than equal power.
A14 Bionic chip specs
This chip has a 6-core CPU — 4 high-efficiency cores and 2 high-performance cores — that increases processing performance by 40% and a new graphics architecture with a 4-core GPU that improves graphics performance by 30%.
To improve AI performance, the A14 Bionic chip incorporates a 16-core Neural Engine that is twice as fast in machine learning tasks, and can perform 11 trillion operations per second.
In addition, it has second-generation accelerators that allow the CPU to do machine learning calculations up to ten times faster.
According to Apple, the combination of the new Neural Engine, machine learning accelerators in the CPU, and the high-performance GPU will enable unique experiences of image recognition, natural language learning, motion analysis, and much more.
Finally, the A14 Bionic chip incorporates a more advanced ISP for better image processing, as well as an even more secure enclave for storing biometric data.
Apple A14 Bionic is the new mobile SoC that the Cupertino firm has created for the iPhone 12. Apple has shown that without being a firm specializing in semiconductors, its designs not only compete with those of Qualcomm and Samsung but also surpass them in performance generation to generation.
What’s inside this SoC that makes it so fast? ICmasters, a semiconductor reverse engineering and IP services company, has decided to find out by putting it under the focus of a transmission electron microscope (TEM) capable of magnifying an object up to a million times.
Apple A14 Bionic under the microscope
This chipset is the most advanced ever designed by Apple. Surely it has had to do that in addition to motorizing its new generation of mobiles is that it is the basis of the A14X, the main engine of the Apple Silicon platform with which the Cupertino giant wants to revolutionize the industry by replacing the Intel x86 hardware that it has been using Mac on its personal computers since they replaced the Power PCs.
The company has detailed that we are facing a 5-nanometer processor manufactured in process and that is made up of six new cores, as well as four new cores dedicated to the GPU. The processor is capable of processing 11 billion operations per second and thanks to its manufacturing process it integrates 11.8 million transistors. Apple has indicated that the processor achieves up to 40% improvement in the performance of traditional processing or CPU and up to 30% higher performance in graphics, with its Quad-Core GPU.
AI-centric
Apple has also detailed that the chip integrates a “Machine Learning” controller for artificial intelligence processes and 16 neural motor cores. The company has simply bypassed some of its key features, including a new advanced image processing process and lower power consumption. Apple has also detailed improvements in security and HDR video processing above.
In a new interview on Endgadget, Apple’s vice president of platform architecture, Tim Millet, and Mac and iPad’s senior director of marketing, Tom Boger, discuss the team’s approach to developing new processors.
It has been a long time since the first iPhone 4, Apple designed the chips of their devices and since then they have been adding more and more components within the same chip to perform more functions. In this sense, the arrival of 5-nanometer manufacturing gives the team much more space to continue adding functions and specializations, as well as expanding existing ones. The new A14 chip, for example, doubles the number of cores in the Neural Engine to 16, allowing it to perform up to 11 trillion operations per second.
“We saw an opportunity to do things that would have been impossible to do with a conventional CPU instruction set,” said Millet. “In theory you could do a lot of the things that the neural engine does in a GPU, but you can’t do it inside a closed, thermally constrained room.”
An approach to multi-device design.
A chip with more features and for more devices
At a general level, both executives comment on how, since the first processors for the iPhone, the chip design team has been expanding responsibilities. Now, when the design of the new generation of the A series is considered, it is considered for more than one device. Thus, the same A14 chip, or at least a variant of it, can end up in an iPad or an Apple Watch. In this sense, the adaptations are made in the numbers of nuclei, but the general design is shared.
“Ultimately, we want to make sure that when we build a CPU for one generation, we are not necessarily building it for just one generation,” Millet said. While that doesn’t mean the A14’s six-core CPU is going to be seen in something like an Apple Watch, the architecture developed for the company’s flagship iPhone chipset could well be adapted and repurposed elsewhere.
You may also like to read:
What will be the next big innovation in Smartphone design?
What is it like to travel, work and live in Dubai — U.A.E.?
Please don’t forget to clap!
