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Apple’s ARM processors stunned with annual major performance gains that have caught up with Intel and AMD in single-threaded performance. But with the new A15, the machine seems to be stuck and the core seems to have made little progress.
Apple has announced new smartphones and with it a new processor. Thanks to very aggressive developments over the last decade, Apple’s CPU cores have become one of the leaders in the field of processors – in some opinions, perhaps even the biggest leader. However, according to the first analyzes, the new mobile SoC A15 with Avalanche and Blizzard cores did not bring massive acceleration at all as before. Performance has increased, but according to the first benchmarks escaped, Apple’s pace has really stalled.
Apple A15 Bionic
Apple has not traditionally communicated many details about the A15 Bionic processor. It is a hybrid big.LITLE six-core, just like the A14 chip last year. Of these, the two cores are large and their architecture is called Avalanche (“avalanche”). The remaining four cores are small or “effective” in Intel’s language, with a Blizzard architecture. In the previous generation, Apple had Firestorm and Icestorm architectures, which would imply that they were new cores. But they don’t have the new features mentioned, Apple didn’t say anything about having these cores anymore ARMv9 architecture or SVE and SVE2 instructions.
The GPU probably has five cores, which is the configuration of the A15 chip in the iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max. The iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini will have graphics cropped to just four cores. However, the neural network accelerator for AI applications has 16 cores as in the A14 chip, only apparently at a higher frequency, as power has increased from the stated 11 TOPS to 15.8 TOPS.
The chip is still manufactured by the 5nm TSMC process, so there was no transition to 4nm, or on 3nm technology. We don’t know what the memory controller is (whether LPDDR5 or still LPDDR4X), but Apple has revealed that it has doubled the system cache (32 MB). And SoC has new DSPs for image processing, new video encoders and video decoders, as well as a new block for video output, where the ability of 120Hz recovery has been added (so far only the iPhone 13 Pro / Pro Max will use it).
A small increase in performance, slows down Apple?
Apple usually mentioned performance gains over previous generations of its processors when launching new phones (or tablets, and so on), although of course, like all official marketing benchmarks, such numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. This week, however, the new A15 Bionic processor instead reported only a comparison with “competitors”, according to which the processor is 50% faster (probably in single-core performance) and the GPU is 30% faster. But if it were measured against last year’s generation of processors in Android phones with Cortex-A78 / X1 architectures, it would actually mean almost no or only a slight (by one digit percentage) acceleration, as was practically immediately pointed out by various commentators.
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Apple A15 Source: Apple / AnandTech
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Apple made a comparison with its own processor only for the new iPad mini tablet, which also gets the A15 chip, but in this case it is a comparison with the already relatively old A12 chip (which was already on the 7nm process). Here, Apple states that the A15 should have 40% faster CPU cores. The problem is that when last year Apple reported an increase in the performance of the previous generation A14 in tablets also against the A12 chip, it said the same number + 40%. This would imply that there is no increase between A14 and A15, however, this mathematics does not work because it could be two different benchmarks with different conditions that cannot be compared. Conversely, the graphics increase in performance is greater, the quad-core version should be 30% and the five-core version 50% faster “against the competition”
The first escape in Geekbench 5: power increased by beat?
The first hasty conclusion that there was no increase in performance, in the end, probably refuted the first power leak in Geekbench 5, although it should be taken with caution so far, because the phones have not yet come out and it is not possible to verify whether it is genuine. According to him, the A15 chip has a power of 1734 points in one thread and the MT score is 4818 points.
This is an improvement of some 8 to 10% in single-threaded (depending on which result you take in Geekbench) and about 20% in multi-threaded performance. Whether consumption changed, but we do not know. What is important, however, is the relationship to frequency. This increase in performance is not only achieved with IPC, ie better performance at 1 MHz, but rather the opposite. According to the Geekbench logo, Apple increased the frequency from 3 GHz to about 3.20 GHz (unless it is 3.25 GHz, hard to say), ie by about 6.5%.
So in this generation, the IPC of the processor has probably not been increased too much and the performance is pushing up the frequency. It is possible that the clock speed of the small Blizzard cores increased by an even larger factor, thus achieving that 20% acceleration in multi-thread. But it could also be given by 32MB of system cache or faster memories.
Gallery: Apple A15, the first benchmark in Geekbench 5
Has the brain drain affected Apple? Or COVID?
In the comments on the new processors, various hypotheses appear as to why Apple did not shift performance so much this time. Early reactions suggested that while the cores could have significantly increased performance to 1 MHz, as fans liked, but that Apple had deliberately reduced their frequency to reduce power consumption and extend battery life. However, according to the escape from Geekbench, the bars seem to have risen.
So it would be more of an explanation that Apple’s development has been delayed, or that it has deliberately switched from a model that develops a significantly faster kernel each year to a looser two-year cycle. The kernels have a new architecture by their name and are therefore not used exactly the same (Firestorm / Icestorm from M1 and A14), but it could probably be a refresh with only minor modifications and improvements, while a larger upgrade will come next.
The reason for such a step could be the disruption of the development and preparation of COVID pandemics and the transfer of work to the Home Office mode. But there is also the possibility that Apple has deeper problems that could slow down the development of its processors in the long run. That’s when it came to the impact of the significant brain drain that Apple’s award-winning processor team was experiencing. In 2019 a number of his engineers left for the Nuvia startup – including the head and chief architect Gerrard Williams III.
We recently had the news that another wave of processor cadre, including veterans with a rather interesting history, had become independent again. startup Rivos, which develops powerful processors for change with the RISC-V architecture. It is possible that while Apple used to attract many people from traditional Intel leaders, but probably also AMD, now it is the other way around. This may not be nearly fatal, as staff turnover is commonplace, and Apple is likely to make up for these losses on an ongoing basis.
However, if he has lost significantly above-average talent in large numbers, he may not be able to innovate the processor architecture with such speed and as good results as in the past (on the other hand, he still has the money factor, where he probably has the best financial options against the competition, including Intel). But it remains to be seen whether such a slowdown in innovation will actually occur, or whether this year’s small increase in performance for the Avalanche and Blizzard architectures was an exception.
Resources: AnandTech, Ice universe, SemiAnalysis
New generation of Apple processors: A15 with Avalanche core. IPC almost the same, stuck development?
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