The iPhone 13 series could be better than what Apple has claimed. According to the latest report, the Apple A15 Bionic chip that powers all the models is actually more capable than what is written on paper. According to a review written by AnandTech on Monday, Oct.4, Apple’s newest chip was in fact 62% faster compared to what the firm claimed previously. The earlier claim was 50% in performance.
Just on the cores, the maximum frequency per core in the A15 reached 3,240Mhz, versus the 2,998 maximum of the A14. The report found an 8% improvement in single-core performance for the two-core cluster, but when both performance cores are running, there’s a 10% average improvement.
The efficiency cores also saw performance improvements, going up 10.5% over the Apple A15 Bionic chip with a maximum frequency of 2,016MHz vs 1,823MHz. A change in the system cache has also helped performance, with Apple moving up from 16MB in the A13 and A14 to 32GB in the A15. Latency tests confirmed the system cache has increased, keeping memory accesses on the same silicon for longer instead of searching DRAM.
From Macrumors recent report, the criticism for the A15 chip could be attributed to the latest PCB design. AnandTech criticized the amount of throttling present in the iPhone 13 Pro.
Meanwhile, the L2 cache has gotten similar upgrades as well and now sports a memory of 12MB. Not only being larger than A14’s 8MB, but it’s also twice as large as the L2 cache memory found on the Snapdragon 888. These enhancements allow the A15 to perform much better despite using the same microarchitecture that isn’t all that different from last year’s A14.
