Apple A series

The Apple A processors are intended exclusively for so-called smart devices, e.g. smartphones or tablets. Older versions are also installed in the AppleTV. The Apple A processors are Apple's own development, but are essentially based on a current ARM design and therefore also use the ARM64 instruction set.

ARM processors are found in almost every current smartphone, but Apple has adapted its processors extremely, so that for many years they have usually been clearly superior to the competing products, at least in the single-core area.

Since the 11th generation of the Apple A series, they have had the addition "Bionic" in their name, as Apple has built its own logic areas for artificial intelligence and machine learning into the processors. In certain application areas, the Apple A processors offer extremely high performance, which in the single-core area achieves a performance similar to that of processors for notebooks. This is really remarkable due to the rather low TDP. In the multi-core benchmarks, however, the processors then have to admit defeat to larger processors.

The current Apple A processors have at least 6 CPU cores, in smartphones (Apple iPhone) Apple uses a hybrid structure of 2 fast CPU cores paired with 4 small and economical CPU cores. Until 2019, Apple relied on upgraded Apple A processors with 8 CPU cores (4x large and 4x small) in tablets, but these processors are now being replaced by Apple M processors, so the latest Apple iPad is already based on the Apple M1 processor .

The internal graphics of the Apple A processors are also impressive and calculate in the example of the Apple A15 with 5 GPU cores with 1.5 TFLOP/s with FP32 floating point calculations. This is very fast and is on par with mid-range notebooks. However, the performance of the CPU and GPU in a small smartphone is limited by the passive cooling and the small cooling surface.

All Apple A series CPUs

	Processor	Generation
	Apple A17 Pro 6C 6T @ 3.78 GHz	17.
	Apple A16 Bionic 6C 6T @ 3.46 GHz	16.
	Apple A15 Bionic (5-GPU) 6C 6T @ 3.23 GHz	15.
	Apple A15 Bionic (4-GPU) 6C 6T @ 3.23 GHz	15.
	Apple A14 Bionic 6C 6T @ 3.00 GHz	14.
	Apple A13 Bionic 6C 6T @ 2.65 GHz	13.
	Apple A12Z Bionic 8C 8T @ 2.49 GHz	12.
	Apple A12X Bionic 8C 8T @ 2.49 GHz	12.
	Apple A12 Bionic 6C 6T @ 2.49 GHz	12.
	Apple A11 Bionic 6C 6T @ 2.39 GHz	11.
	Apple A10X Fusion 6C 6T @ 2.36 GHz	10.
	Apple A10 Fusion 4C 4T @ 2.34 GHz	10.
	Apple A9X 2C 2T @ 2.26 GHz	9.
	Apple A9 2C 2T @ 1.85 GHz	9.
	Apple A8X 3C 3T @ 1.50 GHz	8.
	Apple A8 2C 2T @ 1.50 GHz	8.
	Apple A7 2C 2T @ 1.40 GHz	7.
	Apple A6X 2C 2T @ 1.40 GHz	6.
	Apple A6 2C 2T @ 1.30 GHz	6.
	Apple A5X 2C 2T @ 1.00 GHz	5.

Apple A series generation list

Name	Generation	Segment	Technology	Architecture
Apple A17	17.	Mobile	3 nm	A17
Apple A16	16.	Mobile	4 nm	A16
Apple A15	15.	Mobile	5 nm	A15
Apple A14	14.	Mobile	5 nm	A14 (Firestorm/Icestorm)
Apple A13	13.	Mobile	7 nm	A13 (Lightning / Thunder)
Apple A12/A12X/A12Z	12.	Mobile	7 nm	A12
Apple A11	11.	Mobile	10 nm	A11
Apple A10/A10X	10.	Mobile	10 nm	A10
Apple A9/A9X	9.	Mobile	16 nm	A9
Apple A8/A8X	8.	Mobile	20 nm	A8
Apple A7	7.	Mobile	28 nm	A7
Apple A6/A6X	6.	Mobile	32 nm	A6
Apple A5/A5X	5.	Mobile	32 nm	A5
Apple A4	4.	Mobile	45 nm	A4

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