Apple A13 Bionic vs Apple A14 Bionic

The Apple A14 Bionic is the direct successor to the Apple A13 Bionic.

The Apple A14 Bionic was first released in the Apple iPad Air (2020, 4th Gen). It was Apple's first processor that was manufactured in 5 nm. The Apple A13 made its debut in the Apple iPhone 11 and Apple iPhone 11 Pro. The Apple A13 Bionic is still manufactured in a 7 nm process at TSMC.

This process, too, is already characterized by its high efficiency. However, the difference to 5 nm is again quite large. Both processors have 6 CPU cores that are based on the big.LITTLE logic. In the Apple A14 Bionic, 2 high-performance cores of the "Icestorm" type are used. These are supplemented by 4 smaller and thus weaker but also more efficient cores of the "Firestorm" type.

The Apple A13 Bionic also uses an almost identical structure. The Apple A14 Bionic is the first Apple processor to support the decoding of the new video codec AV1 in hardware. Since this video codec is predicted to have a good future and widespread use, this is to be assessed positively.

While the Apple A14 Bionic already controls LPDDR5-5500 RAM, the previous year's Apple A13 Bionic still uses LPDDR4X-4266 RAM. A faster main memory increases the memory bandwidth significantly, and the new LPDDR5 standard is more energy-efficient. Both processors have internal graphics (iGPU), which enable the mobile processors to play graphically more demanding games on the smartphone or tablet.

With a computing power (FP32) of almost 900 or 732 GFLOPS, these are roughly on par with mediocre iGPUs for mobile and desktop processes from Intel or AMD. However, the Apple iGPU does not come close to the latest iGPU solutions from both manufacturers. These can now provide up to 2000 GFLOPS.