On Tuesday, at the company’s “Time Flies” special event, Apple unveiled a new chip that will power the next generation of its hardware, including iPhone 12. The A14 Bionic, which will ship first with the new iPad Air, is Apple’s fastest SoC yet by far.
A breakthrough 5‑nanometer process technology allows for many more transistors in the same space. The result is increased performance in nearly every area and even more power efficiency for up to 10 hours of battery life. The Apple A14 Bionic inside the new iPad Air features an incredible 11.8 billion transistors.
The A14 Bionic chip’s new six-core CPU with four high-efficiency cores and two high-performance cores gives you a huge jump in performance and is faster than most PC laptops. It’s 40% faster than the previous generation iPad Air’s A12 Bionic.
The A14 Bionic delivers blazing-fast graphics that can render 3D objects and deliver immersive high-frame games. It’s graphics capabilities are 30% faster versus the previous generation iPad Air’s A12 Bionic.
The Apple‑designed next‑generation 16‑core Neural Engine can process 11 trillion operations per second, resulting in a 2x increase in machine learning performance. And machine learning accelerators deliver a 10x jump in computations, elevating machine learning applications to an entirely new level of performance.
MacDailyNews Take: A variant of which is bound for Apple’s first Apple silicon-powered Mac, which we expect to be a 12-inch MacBook, this year!
The tech geeks are beside themselves….
Sod working on quality control counting all those transistors
I enjoy hearing about high transistor count as I was a teenager in the 60’s and 70’s and the early processors (like the Intel 4004 CPU) had thousands of transistors which blew my mind and now the transistor count is in the billions. That’s just crazy. I can’t wrap my head around trillions of operations a second. However, big investors hear about this tech and they just yawn like it was nothing. Oh, well… money is the only thing that matters to them so they can’t possibly fathom how crucial this tech is.
Apple has some pretty powerful CPUs but it’s Nvidia’s GPUs that get all the processor industry love. I’m really anxious to see what Apple can do with discrete ARM GPUs and if they even come close to AMD and Nvidia’s offerings. I know Apple won’t be building anything like a 350W three PCI-slot RTX3090 which is just absolutely bonkers.
Nvidia is a GM Corvette or Tesla EV (no refinement) and Apple is Apple or a Porsche 911 Turbo S understated refinement), Nvidia without a in house OS can’t win long term. That is why they are buying ARM.
And when the deal with ARM close’s they will go to court against Apple for money.
“I know Apple won’t be building anything like a 350W three PCI-slot RTX3090 which is just absolutely bonkers.”
But, it won’t be because Apple can’t hit those numbers, it’ll be because the entire world will see, with each release of each successive Apple Silicon system, that 350W is what you do when you’ve run out of ideas, BUT there’s still a lot of electricity left to draw from.
Like a Dodge Demon worthless….
ok, how fast is it really?
all that needs to be done is the speed test using final cut, across the macbooks and ipads.
The first Apple Silicon will go into the current MacBook Air. Just look at the thermal design – it has no fan! The heat sink is tiny – clearly engineered to be using a low heat chip and all Apple has to do is pop in a new CPU to have it’s first AS laptop.
Mac Book and Mac Mini, that is my WAG at the first inclusion of Apple Silicon,
Mac Book because never enough room for power due to heating constraints, mini because they have been there, delivered that already.
Imagine a 13″ Macbook, running faster than almost all laptops, getting 18 hours, and even costing less
Dual processor mac mini running faster than a $2K server and reducing cooling and energy cost for the enterprise
Either way, the impact would be huge if all performance metrics beat the “others” in a previously constrained environment (thermal envelope) like the iPhone is now, opening the door to multi processor systems (read: MacBook Pro or iMac)
this will fill the britches of the competition with you know what