Indicators of improved performance and energy efficiency of the Apple A14 processor

We are not expected to hear anything about the new phone processor from Apple until next September, when the company unveils the iPhone 12 series, but it may take years to design these chips and take months to increase production, and given that it is expected that the Apple A14 has already been put in place, and test production may have begun. Apple's phone chips have taken the crown for overall performance, and despite some big promises, Apple is expected to retain the crown when new iPhones are launched this year.

Topic contents Toggle Speculation about the Apple A14 processor

The Unannounced Leap in 5nm manufacturing Large transistor budget CPU performance Graphics Speculation about the unannounced Apple A14 processor One can never determine the actual features or performance that the unknown A-series processor will offer, but we can only make some educated guesses and place indicators about what the Apple A14 processor will offer later this year, and these indicators are as follows Leap in 5nm manufacturing for the third year in a row, Apple will benefit from its manufacturing partner’s manufacturing process improvements from TSMC said the A12 was built on a 7nm process, and the A13 was made on an improved 7nm process that essentially allowed for faster clock speeds and lower power consumption, when running at the same speeds as chips made using the previous 7nm process. Apple has revealed that this year it could move to TSMC's all-new 5nm process, and that it is expected to be the first large-scale consumer chip to ship using it. TSMC says it offers 80 percent more logic density and can operate either 15 percent faster at the same power as 7nm chips, or 30 percent less power at the same performance level, and the design  

It will also be important, Apple will not achieve these exact numbers, but during the manufacturing process the A14 chip will be much faster and more power efficient. Big Transistor Budget Apple will likely keep the processor at the same overall size this year, so around 100mm2 is a decent size for a high-performance premium mobile processor with a lot of stacked components.

If we take TSMC's 5nm transistor density optimization, we're looking at a cool 15 billion transistors if Apple reduces the total chip area a bit to about 85mm2 and about 12.5 billion transistors. The transistor count itself is a poor way to determine a processor's performance and efficiency, but it does tell us how much space Apple has to work with.

CPU Performance For the A13, Apple didn't do much to change the underlying CPU architecture, instead  the company relied on the faster clock speeds provided by the improved 7nm process to improve performance. Simply following the trend line we can expect it to score A14  

Around 1600, the 5nm process alone should be about 8 percent faster than the improved 7nm process Apple is using in the A13, which gives us a score in the mid-1400s. I suspect Apple will likely end up in the 1500 to 1600 range, given the higher peak clock speeds and some architectural improvements made possible by the much higher transistor budget.

Multi-core performance is difficult to predict but with the big jump in transistor density from 5nm, Apple may be able to add a third large core, or significantly boost the performance of the high-efficiency core, which will boost performance.

Graphics Graphics performance will  

It makes gaming really shine, but the GPU is also used for computational functions in image processing, machine learning, and a lot of other tasks, where GPU performance is critical and Apple won't handle the A14. #Power consumption #Apple A14 processor