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This year, the base model iPhone 14 (and its bigger sibling) will likely stick with an A15 chip, while the Pro models will get an A16. That means that the performance of the iPhone 14 Pro could be a lot better than that of the base models.
It’s hard to say what that might mean for the performance of the iPhone 14 Pro, but you can at least get a rough idea…
Jason Cross of Macworld did his best. Everything is compared to the iPhone 13 Pro.
First, you don’t have to guess how chips are made. TSMC’s most advanced process is a third-generation 5nm process called N4P. This gives a small but noticeable boost to performance.
Over the original 5nm “N5” manufacturing process, N4P improves performance by 11 percent, power efficiency by 22 percent, and density by 6 percent.
On the other hand, its memory should get faster. Back in March, an Apple analyst said that the LPDDR4 memory in the iPhone 14 Pro models would be upgraded to LPDDR5. Today, Digitimes confirmed this report. Apple uses this faster memory in the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips.
This should make memory bandwidth better, and that, along with some other improvements and faster peak clock speeds, could give Apple a 15 percent boost in performance.
Cross talks about ARMv9 support, but he doesn’t think it will make much of a difference. He then talks about GPU performance. He thinks that the usual improvements will happen with a possible extra core, changes to the architecture, and faster access to memory.
We think it’s reasonable to expect a 25–30% boost in GPU performance, which is about the same as what we’ve seen in the last few A-series processors. This will show up most in benchmarks and tests where memory bandwidth is currently a limited.
The iPhone 14 Pro is expected to have a 48MP camera sensor that can record 8K video. This feature will need as much processing power as it can get. Kuo and anotherr analyst, Jeff Pu, both think that this will be shown on the main camera. Cross thinks that most of the extra speed will be used for image processing and artificial intelligence.
You can’t just put a 48MP sensor in and be done with it. You need data paths to the image signal processor that are both wider and faster. That image processor has to be able to handle four times as many pixels (or else it will take four times as long to process the image, which is unlikely since Apple puts a lot of importance on how quickly the camera works). […]
In other words, this new camera is likely to need an image signal processor and Neural Engine that are much more powerful (the dedicated hardware for AI and machine learning tasks). I’m sure Apple would love to improve the iPhone 13 Pro’s Cinematic Mode. For example, it can only do 1080p right now, but to go to 4K, it would need more image processing power. Also, more natural-looking artificial bokeh or tracking of more than one subject would help. All of these are good reasons for Apple to make the image processor and Neural Engine much stronger.
This is another place where having more memory bandwidth will be helpful.
By switching from LPDDR4x to LPDDR5, memory bandwidth will increase by up to 50 percent, and energy efficiency should also improve. This doesn’t make any single task go faster; it just gives high-bandwidth tasks like 3D graphics and image/video processing more room to breathe.
The whole thing is worth reading.
