Apple A12 Bionic vs Apple A14 Bionic

In the CPU comparison of the Apple A12 Bionic against the Apple A14 Bionic you can see how Apple could significantly increase the performance of generation to generation.

This concerns the CPU as well as the GPU part of the APUS. Apple benefits from modern production in addition to the IPC improvement of each generation. The Apple is always one of the first manufacturers who use new manufacturing technologies. Thus, the Apple A14 BIONIC as one of the first processors is manufactured at all in the 5 nm manufacturing process at TSMC.

The finer structures allow higher clock frequencies with lower heat development. Of this, the processors benefit primarily for multi-core scenarios where older processors quickly have to throttle their clock frequency to overheat. Both mobile processors are optimized for smartphones and tablets and have a hybrid core architecture (Big.Little).

In this case, strong high performance cores are combined with weaker and economical energy-saving cores. Depending on the utilization of the processor, it can distribute the requests to the optimal CPU cores. This not only saves energy but can also increase performance when all cores work together on one or more queries.

Through the finer structures, the Apple A14 Bionic now has a base frequency of 1.8 GHz, during the Apple A12 Bionic His cores with 1.59 GHz clocks. The performance cores of the A14 can achieve clock frequencies in turbo mode for the first time of just over 3 GHz, which is currently the top spot for a smartphone processor.

In the IGPU of Apple A14 Bionic, the support of video codecs has improved in addition to the blueprint. This is how the free and new AV1 videoCODEC is supported (decoding in hardware). Both processors probably have a TDP of 6 watts and support up to 16 GB of RAM (LPDDR4X-4266 at the A12 or LPDDR5-5500 at the A14).