In a nutshell: Apple is expected to further define the line between its flagship and flagship iPhones in September when the next generation of devices is introduced. Most believe Apple will do this by reserving its A16 SoC for pro-level iPhones and shipping its other new iPhones with the A15 in the iPhone 13 family.
Macworld’s Jason Cross recently looked at the big picture, including previous improvements, to try to predict what kind of performance we can expect from the A16. The general rumor consensus is that Apple will manufacture the A16 on a 5nm process, just as it did with the A15 and A14 before it.
The A16 will likely use TSMC’s third-generation 5nm process, which will offer only a slight increase in performance and efficiency. A much more significant leap in performance and efficiency will come when Apple adopts a chip based on a 3nm process, but it’s not expected to be ready for the pending iPhone 14 launch.
Cross believes the A16 could pack up to 20 billion transistors, many of which will be used to power the Neural Engine for machine learning, as well as the Image Signal Processor (ISP) and encoders/decoders for video
The iPhone 14 Pro is rumored to feature a new 48MP camera that will require wider and faster data paths to the ISP. Without proper infrastructure, image processing times would suffer and this is not congruent with Apple’s strategy.
The A16 will likely stick with the same basic configuration of two performance cores along with four high-efficiency cores.
Cross also expects Apple to implement LPDDR5 memory this year, a move that would certainly increase memory bandwidth. Moving from LPDDR4x to LPDDR5 could increase memory bandwidth by up to 50 percent. Cross through Apple was supposed to make the jump last year, but of course, it didn’t happen.
Along with a few other tweaks, we could see that the A16 offers up to a 15 percent performance improvement over its predecessor.
As for the GPU, it is believed that Apple will go with five GPU cores in the A16 or maybe six, but no more. Again, other architectural improvements and the move to LPDDR5 memory will only further boost graphics performance.
All told, we could see a performance increase of up to 30 percent compared to last year’s A15 on the GPU side.
Lastly, Cross believes the iPhone 14 Pro will use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X65 modem instead of its homegrown 5G modem. Last year’s iPhone 13 Pro was equipped with a Snapdragon X60 5G chip; the X65 offers up to 10 Gbit/s maximum download speed compared to the X60’s 7.5 Gbit/s.
Some believe Apple’s own 5G chip could be ready to debut in 2023, while others believe major setbacks will push it back several years.
Image credit: John Appleseed, James Yarema