The iPhone 14 Pro with its A16 chip could promise big performance improvements. The iPhone 14’s A15 chip could also be faster.
One of the most disappointing news for iPhone fans this year is the choice of chips for the iPhone 14 range. Apple is not stepping up to the 3nm manufacturing process this year for its chips in the series A16 and will therefore reuse the 5nm node for this year’s iPhone 14 models. The iPhone 14 is said to reuse the A15 chip from the iPhone 13, while the iPhone 14 Pro will get a “new” A16 chip that will have modest performance upgrades. However, analyst predictions suggest that these iPhone 14 models will actually be faster than the iPhone 13 versions. Take a look.
Based on the latest predictions published by MacWorld, the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Max are said to use the A15 chip from the iPhone 13 series, but in a different tuning state. To recall, the A15 chip in the iPhone 13 was weaker with its 4-core GPU than the A15 in the iPhone 13 Pro, which had a 5-core GPU. The vanilla iPhone 14 models will come with this same “iPhone 13 Pro” chip, with the 5-core GPU and the same 6GB of LPDDR4X RAM. Technically, these vanilla models should be faster than the standard iPhone 13.
The chips in the iPhone 14 series could be more powerful
On the other hand, the A16 chip in the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max will offer a significant increase in performance. The A16, according to new rumors, will be manufactured on the TSMC N4P node, which is an upgraded version of the N5P node used for the A15. Although based on a 5nm process, the N5P node will also have the A16 up to 20 billion transistors, which is a substantial jump from the A15 chip. It is also expected that Apple can use the new ARMv9 platform.
All of this could result in the A16 chip offering a 15 percent increase in CPU performance. Additionally, Apple will use faster LPDDR5 RAM, which despite being limited to 6GB, will offer 50 percent more bandwidth than LPDDR4X RAM. It will also be more energy efficient. The GPU is also expected to see a 25 percent performance upgrade. The chip will also have a new ISP and ML core to handle the new 48MP main rear camera, which could also enable 8K video recording. We could also see Cinema mode bumped up to 4K resolution from the current 1080p.
Note that these are all predictions and nothing has been confirmed by Apple yet. So you should take everything with a grain of salt.