Apple A15 Bionic soc has 15 billion transistors and is made on 5nm process

The A15 Bionic soc, which Apple uses in its iPhone 13 series, is just like the A14 Bionic made on a 5nm process. The new soc has 15 billion transistors, which is 3.2 billion more than the predecessor. There will be variants with 4 and 5 GPU cores.

Like the two previous generations of Apple socs, the A15 Bionic has six CPU cores, of which two are powerful cores and four are economical cores. The 16-core Neural Engine is also unchanged from the previous generation, but it can now perform 15.8 trillion calculations per second, according to Apple. In the previous generation, it was 11 trillion.

Apple makes two variants of the A15 Bionic. The iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini contain a variant with four GPU cores, just like in previous generations of the soc. The iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max contain a variant with five GPU cores. The new iPad mini also gets the A15 Bionic soc with five GPU cores.

Details about the clock speeds of the cpu and gpu, or changes in the chip architecture, Apple has not disclosed. The manufacturer does indicate in its presentation that the design of the cores as well as the display engine and image signal processor have been renewed.

Apple says nothing about the performance compared to previous Bionic-socs. The manufacturer does claim that the CPU of the A15 Bionic is up to 50 percent faster than the competition and that would be 30 percent for the GPU. However, Apple does not mention which competitor it is being compared with.