A14 enhances the lead of the industry leading A13 chip still Apple decided against high refresh rate displays
Apple hosted its “September event” today; due to supply chain disruptions caused by the global pandemic, Apple had to shift its September iPhone event to October. This time around, Apple announced four different iPhones to penetrate the upper-midrange and flagship market. While these devices represent the upper echelon of technical improvement in the smartphone industry, these devices still lack the ‘2020 thing,’ which is high-refresh displays. Apple makes some of the best-looking displays in the market, but the 60Hz refresh rate seems outdated, especially for the $1000 market.
A14 Bionic
Driving a high-refresh-rate display in computationally expensive situations like games is an arduous task, but Apple makes the best smartphone SoC on the planet. The year-old A13 Bionic is still faster than ALL android phones out there while the A14 carries the lead forward.
A14 Bionic is the first smartphone chip to be fabricated on TSMC’c new 5nm process. The reduction in the transistor size enables Apple to pack more and more transistors to increase performance while maintaining or reducing the die size, which results in better thermal performance. Apple was able to pack 11.8 billion transistors in the A14 chip.
The chip features a hexacore CPU containing two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. Apple claims it is around 50% faster than any other smartphone chip. The new quad-core GPU features improved memory compression, which enhances the image quality and overall efficiency both in games and in ML tasks. Apple boasts a similar claim for its GPU too.
Apple has also upgraded its neural engine enabling almost 80% performance boost over the last generation. The neural engine features a new 16-core design to help with machine learning and AI-related tasks.
Overall, the A14 boasts a significant performance boost compared with the A13, which is still faster than any other smartphone processor. However, one still wonders why Apple decided against the high-refresh-rate displays.
