World news – AU – Apple iPhone 12 will be powered by the A14 Bionic 5nm chip, already seen in the new iPad Air?

Apple will launch the latest iPhone 12 series today The Apple iPhone 12 series is expected to be powered by Apple’s A14 Bionic chip that the company first announced times with the iPad Air 2020 update last month The A14 Bionic chip contains a six-core processor, with two high-performance cores and four cores for lower-performing tasks, as well as a quad-core GPU The A14 Bionic is designed on a 5nm manufacturing process, making it the first commercially available 5nm chip Ahead of the iPhone 12’s launch, Apple’s vice president for platform architecture, Tim Millet, shared more information on the design of the A14 Bionic chip and the impressive performance they saw from the A14 Bionic In an interview with Engadget, Millet, with Apple’s senior manager for the Mac and iPad product market, Tom Boger shed some light on the projects Apple for the A14 Bionic chipset, and what it means for the company

The transition to a 5nm chip means that Apple now has more transistors to devote to all systems of the chip The A14 Bionic has 118 billion transistors, compared to 8 for the A135 billion transistors While the additional transistors directly give Apple more room to place faster processor and GPU cores, they also gave Apple the foundation to further improve the overall experience of a device Additionally, the 5nm architecture gave Apple the basis to dedicate more transistors to things beyond the CPU and GPU. This gives Apple the ability to decide everything that goes into its SoCs

This is where Apple chooses to put the Neural Engine While the first Neural Engine we saw on the iPhone X in 2017 could perform 600 billion operations per second, the Neural Engine of the A14 is capable of performing 11 trillion operations per second Apple made this possible by crushing 16 cores in the A14 neural engine, up from eight in last year’s A13 Bionic chip Now, while doubling the number of cores on the neural engine is an impressive achievement in itself, many iOS features that depended on it seem to work seamlessly without the latest neural engine in the A14 chip So why not just use the extra space to boost CPU and GPU performance? Millet told Engaged that the answer to this question is twofold

First, Apple continues to see huge potential in supercharging neural networks, not just for its own software, but for what developers might be able to achieve with the right components in place. The popular Pixelmator Pro image editing app, for example, uses the Neural Engine for a feature that makes low-resolution images sharper. “We saw the opportunity to do things that would have been impossible to do with a conventional CPU instruction set. You could, in theory, do a lot of things that a Neural Engine does on a GPU, but you can’t do it inside a sealed and thermally constrained case of a conventional GPU”Millet said

In addition, Millet said that the other part of the reason for using Neural Engines is that Apple needs to balance power with efficiency “We try to focus on energy efficiency, because that is. applies to every product we make By making this a fundamental goal of its chip design, Apple doesn’t have to worry about a situation where it has focused on power efficiency for the iPhone in a way that won’t work in an iPad Air Of course it will work, ”Millet told Engadget

While this all sounds super impressive at first glance, there is still some speculation on the exact speed of Apple’s A14 Bionic chipset from its predecessors. Apple did not give any details on the performance compared to the A13 Bionic While presenting the iPad Air as well, Apple said that the A14 Bionic provides 40% faster performance and 30% better graphics than the previous model This comparison, however, was for the A12 chipset from the previous iPad Air. Even so, the actual performance numbers differ from what Apple claims Boger told Engadget that those numbers were a merger of “real application workloads.” To put it more simply, these are the numbers derived from different performance factors to demonstrate what it is like to actually use the A14 Bionic chip

Millet, on the other hand, said that Apple understands that single-thread performance for many applications is important, so the company makes sure that when it talks about things like that, it represents the performance of a single thread

When asked whether the A14 Bionic blurs the lines between the iPhone and the iPad, Miller and Boger both pointed out that the current A12Z chipset on the iPad Pro has more CPU and GPU cores than the ‘A14 Bionic Higher GPU computing power essentially means the iPad Pro will continue to be better suited for graphics work and other high-performance tasks Boger, however, noted that the A14 effectively outperforms the A12Z in some areas

Millet also said that when Apple starts working on a chipset, they take into account the entire range of the company. “At the end of the day, we want to make sure that when we build a processor for a generation, we don’t necessarily build it for one,” he said. When asked if the development of Apple’s A14 chips had been influenced by the company’s work on Mac chips, Millet said: “Sometimes it’s the constraints of a single platform that drives the the intention »

Apple mobile application processors, integrated circuits, iPhone, Apple