The CPU fragmentation between the iPhone 14 A15 and iPhone 14 Pro A16 isn’t as awful as it seems.

At first glance, Apple’s plan to continue using the A15 processor in the iPhone 14 and its larger, 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Plus sibling may not seem fair to potential prospective buyers. Due to the fact that the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max will include the newest 4nm A16 CPU, this is the first time Apple has divided its yearly iPhone upgrade into inexpensive and expensive handsets depending on the chipsets they are powered by.

 

Even the budget models with smaller displays and lower pixel density, which don’t really require them to run iOS and its apps without a hitch, typically have the most recent and finest A-series processor. Why now, and what can we anticipate from the processing capability of the iPhone 14 series?

 

Performance benchmarks for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro

Tim Higgins of the Wall Street Journal reiterates that the “basic models will get an upgraded version of the present A15 CPU” even though we’ve already heard that the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus may be equipped with a quicker A15 chip than the ones found in the iPhone 13 mini and the iPhone 13. What could that improved A15 be, now?

 

We need look no farther than the iPhone 13 models from a year ago to find examples of processor fragmentation in the same iPhone series. While the base $699 iPhone 13 mini and $799 iPhone 13 received the same Apple A15 processor with two high-performance Avalanche cores running at a maximum 3.24GHz and four energy-efficient Blizzard cores running at 2.01GHz as the $999 iPhone 13 Pro and $1099 13 Pro Max, there was a difference in the number of GPU cores.

 

The A15 chipset’s graphics subsystem features a penta-core GPU in the Pro versions, compared to the iPhone 13’s four active cores. This “improved” A15 will likely be found in the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus, assuaging owners’ FOMO because the A16’s performance will only be marginally inferior in terms of processing and graphics capability.

 

In truth, the Apple A15 is built on TSMC’s 5nm production node, which only has 6% less transistors and is only at most 11% slower than the second-generation 4nm node that the Apple A16 is most likely to be rolled out with. Since the semiconductor foundries began pursuing these tiny sub-7nm nodes, this has been a pattern with Apple’s CPU family.

 

Prior to the Apple A15, the preceding four generations of Apple CPUs provided at least a 20% performance improvement over their forerunners; however, between the A14 and A15, this improvement decreased to 11%, and it is now anticipated to return at 11%. That’s scarcely what Apple must have aiming for with the iPhone 14 series CPU fragmentation, as the performance difference between the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro will be very near to our iPhone 12 versus iPhone 13 results you can see above, namely a single digit performance boost.

 

The iPhone 14 Pro’s Apple A16 is designed for 8K video, not for peak clock rates.

 

Remember that these are the greatest increases, and Apple might decide against increasing peak clock counts that are already the highest among its competitors in favour of the 22% energy efficiency benefit of the N4P 4nm process that TSMC stated.

 

Therefore, compared to the A15 with penta-core GPU in the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus, the Apple A16 in the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max will not offer significantly quicker speed, but rather reduced power consumption for the same clock speeds.

 

It might be argued that this is more significant because users won’t be able to see much of a difference between the A15 and A16 chipsets in the iPhone 14 series other than the A16’s image processing optimization for 8K video encoding and decoding. This is the reason Apple decided to give the iPhone 14 Pro versions a new 4nm CPU and a 48MP main camera upgrade.

 

The iPhone 14’s Apple A15 will be able to deliver the same unmatched high-definition recording in 4K at 60 frames per second or Cinematic video effects as the iPhone 13, but it will also add the ProRes mode of the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, bringing the Pros’ higher colour fidelity and detail quality to Apple’s most affordable iPhones in 2022.

 

In other words, if you don’t need 8K video, you probably won’t notice any difference between the processing speed or general performance of the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro, especially because you’ll probably be getting the ProRes video option, which was previously only available on the Pro versions.