Apple A15 Bionic (5-GPU)
Benchmarks & Specs

The Apple A15 Bionic is a 6-core SoC that was presented to the public in autumn 2021 with the Apple iPhone 13 and Apple iPhone 13 Pro. The SoC is again based on a 2 + 4 CPU core design, whereby the 2 "Avalanche" performance cores are supported by 4 energy-efficient CPU cores dubbed "Blizzard".

A clock frequency of 3.23 GHz is determined for the processor in Geekbench 5.4.1. The CPU cores can process a maximum of 1 thread per core at the same time. The cores do not have a turbo mode, but it is probably the case that Apple does not specify the base clock frequency. This cannot currently be read out using tools, so we can only assume that the processor does not continuously clock at 3.23 GHz.

Compared to its direct predecessor, the Apple A14 Bionic, Apple was able to increase the performance of the smartphone SoC by approx. 10-15 percent. The level 1 system cache has doubled compared to its predecessor, the level 2 cache remains the same at 4 MB. Both the Apple A15 Bionic and the Apple A14 Bionic are manufactured in a 5 nm process at TSMC, with the slightly improved "N5 +" process being used for the newer Apple A15 Bionic, which further reduces energy consumption.

This has a positive effect on the battery life. The new iPhone 13 / iPhone 13 Pro last about 1 hour longer. Apple has doubled the neural cores compared to the Apple A14 Bionic, this is said to benefit the image and video processing in particular. The graphics performance is also significantly higher than that of the predecessor. With the Apple A15, Apple also distinguishes between two expansion levels: the smaller one has only 4 GPU cores (Apple iPhone 13), while the larger version (Apple iPhone 13 Pro) comes with 5 GPU cores (approx. 20% more power).

The TDP of the Apple A15 Bionic is 8.5 watts, but the SoC throttles its performance slightly after a while so as not to overheat.

• High energy efficiency thanks to 5-nm manufacturing
• Powerful integrated graphics unit
• Fast data processing through large cache memories
• Responsive user experience