Apple unveils the A16 Bionic, its most powerful mobile chip yet

At a jam-packed event in Cupertino this morning, Apple revealed details of the chip powering the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max: the A16 Bionic. The successor to the A15 Bionic (which can be found in the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus), it packs more transistors — 16 billion, manufactured on a 4nm process — and components specially-designed to accelerate AI and other tasks across smartphone apps and iOS.

Apple says that the A16 Bionic has a multi-core processor with six high-performance and two efficiency cores, a five-core GPU and a 16-core neural engine for performing up to 17 trillion operations per second. The company further claims the high-performance cores use 20% less power compared to the A15 Bionic’s performance cores, while the efficiency cores use a third of the power of unnamed competitor chips.

The GPU has up to 50% more memory bandwidth, and overall, Apple says that A16 Bionic is upwards of 40% faster than rival chipsets.

Other standout features include a custom image signal processor that powers the iPhone 14 Pro’s camera system. The processor, GPU, neural engine and image signal processor in the A16 Bionic work together to support the new camera hardware and perform up to 4 trillion operations per photo. Meanwhile, a new display engine enables 1 Hz refresh rates, high peak brightness, features like always-on display and antialiasing to smooth out rough edges in display graphics.

Apple unveils the A16 Bionic, its most powerful mobile chip yet by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch