5nm made Apple A14 Bionic-soc has Neural Engine with 16 cores

Apple has announced its new A14 Bionic-soc. The chip is made at 5nm and is equipped with six CPU cores and four GPU cores. Apple is putting the soc in its new iPad Air, but the A14 is probably also coming to the iPhone 12 series.

At the presentation of the new iPad Air, Apple gave the first details about the 5nm made soc. The A14 Bionic is equipped with 11.8 billion transistors and contains six CPU cores and four GPU cores. Since Apple uses the soc in the iPad Air first, the manufacturer compared the performance with the A12 Bionic-soc that is in the iPad Air 2019. According to Apple, the CPU cores are 40 percent faster and the GPU is 30 percent faster. That is not about the performance gain compared to the A13 Bionic-soc from the iPhone 11 models.

The structure of the A14 is largely the same as that of the A13 and A12, with two powerful cores and four efficient cores. The CPU cores have been improved and provided with larger caches, according to Apple, but exact details have not been disclosed.

The Neural Engine will be upgraded to sixteen cores. With the A13 Bionic, that part of the chip has eight cores. Apple claims the chip can perform eleven trillion operations per second. With the A13 Bionic, Apple still spoke of five trillion operations per second. Apple also says that the A14-soc is equipped with fast machine learning accelerators.

Presumably, the A14 Bionic-soc is made using TSMC’s 5nm process. Apple had its previous socs made on the 7nm process of that chipmaker. In addition to TSMC, Samsung also has a 5nm process that is ready for mass production.