A14 Bionic is here before the iPhone

A14 Bionic is here before the iPhone

The first global five-nanometer process technology chip, built for ML and AI.

The latest A14 Bionic Chip — Photo by 

The ‘time flies’ event that streamed today brought some major upgrades to Apple Watch & iPad line up, and disappointed fans who were expecting a new iPhone. But one of the most prominent announcements of the day was the latest A-Series processor. Usually, Apple announces the latest chips during the iPhone launch event. In the past years, the launch of a new chip in the A-series has been one of the key highlights of every iPhone launch event where Apple talks about how great the chip is going to be in terms of performance inside the iPhone. Apple has been continuously pushing the limits every year in terms of CPU and GPU with these bionic chips and this year is no different.

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In today’s event, Tim Millet — VP, Platform Architecture at apple unveiled the latest A14 Bionic Chip which Apple claims to be the first chip in the world that uses the five-nanometer process technology. That is a long way from the A4 chip that was originally featured in the first-generation iPad from 2010. In case it’s not clear yet, the dimensions of the 5nm transistors are measured in atoms.

‘Evolution of apple’s older chips before A14 — Photo by 

The A14 contains a whopping 11.8 billion transistors inside it, a 40% increase compared to the A13’s 8.5 billion transistors. A14 also got a pretty good update in terms of CPU, featuring a 6-core design including 4 high-efficiency and 2 high-performance cores that can give a 40% boost in CPU performance compared to its predecessor. The GPU has also got a major upgrade from the older chip, with the new 4-core graphics architecture Apple promised to deliver a 30% improvement in graphics.

The neural engine on A14 — Photo by 

Apple has already set the standards high for machine learning capabilities on mobile chips with last year’s A13 and this time they have doubled the number of cores to build a 16-core architecture for Neural Engine. Apple claims that it is capable of performing up to 11 trillion operations per second, allowing machine learning and AI apps to harness power unlike anything before, on a mobile device. The CPU also contains a second-generation machine learning accelerators with accelerated matrix multiplication that can perform machine learning calculations 10 times faster compared to the older chip.

The chip also features the latest image signal processor for higher quality photos and videos and a faster secure enclave for Touch id ( for the new iPad). All these features along with the numerous custom technologies that can drive the unique iPad experience will attract gamers and professionals with the best performing mobile chip ever. Whereas app developers can take full advantage of the chip features to build more powerful and high performing apps that could only run on a Mac or PC before.

Custom features on the A14 bionic- Photo by 

Interestingly Apple also announced that iOS 14 will be made available to the public tomorrow, which is again very unusual for Apple to release the latest mobile OS before the new iPhone. This along with the announcement of the A14 chip has left many people wondering if there’s something up in their sleeves left to be the highlight of the upcoming iPhone launch event that may happen very soon in October. As always Apple likes to keep us guessing till launch day.

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