Apple’s upcoming A14 processor could make the next-gen iPhone as powerful as a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Per a full rundown by the mighty Jason Cross at Macworld, the processor is expected to move from a 7 nanometer production process to a 5 nanometer production process. This, in turn, could allow for no less than 15 billion transistors, which dwarfs all but the largest high-end desktop and server CPUs and GPUs.
It could also greatly improve what the chip can do in terms of multi-core performance:
The trend line gives us a score around 4,500, but I think a combination of architectural changes and clock speed will give us a lot more. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Geekbench 5 multi-core score creeps up to 5,000 or so.
For what it’s worth, the fastest Android phones score around 3,000 on this test, and a score of 5,000 would be similar to 6-core mainstream desktop CPUs or high-end laptop CPUs. It’s 15-inch MacBook Pro territory.
The additional transistors in the GPU and a rumored allotment of 6GB of RAM could also see gaming performance boosted by about 50 percent:
I expect Apple to expend significant transistor budget making the GPU more powerful. Along with more memory bandwidth, we can probably expect GPU performance well beyond the trend line’s prediction of the low 7,000 range in this test. Barring some new performance bottleneck, I think a score over 9,500 is certainly possible. In other words, I think we can expect a 50% improvement in graphics performance for the kind of high-end graphics used in games.
Cross also cites expected improvements in the Neural Engine core of the processor, which could make machine learning tasks roughly twice as fast as on the A13 processor.
It’s a good, detailed piece and definitely worth reading.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.