Apple’s A15 chip is causing a lot of confusion because Apple decided
not to compare their A15 chip to their previous A14 during their recent event,
causing people to believe that there are barely any improvements at all this year.
So I ended up watching some of the other takes on YouTube about what in the world
is going on with Apple’s new A15 chip and what it means for future chips like the M1X
and the M2, and I think that a lot of the takes are missing some important details!
But thankfully, reviews of the iPhone 13 just came out and we obviously got a massive improvement,
at least with the 5-core GPU version on the 13 Pro giving us as much as 14,437 Metal graphics points,
which is 55% faster than the A14 chip in the iPhone 12!
So I’ve been doing a bit of research and I think I’ve
actually figured out exactly what the A15 chip is based on,
which basically confirms many of my other theories on the upcoming M1X chip and the future M2 chip.
So before I get into explaining my theory, I want to point to a couple of very important
details that I found out about the A15 chips performance benchmarks that led to this discovery.
Like I said before, the 5-core GPU version of the A15
was able to score a huge 55% improvement in Mrwhosetheboss’s recent tests.
However, the 4-core GPU version of the A15 scored around 10,875 points,
which is very interesting because it’s the same 4-core GPU layout as the A14 chip, showing
that there is around a 16 improvement due to having faster or better cores.
Now this brought me to a very interesting article by the AAPL Tree on twitter,
who examined the leaked benchmarks a few days ago before these reviews were out,
and he came up with some awesome conclusions.
He looked at the CPU benchmarks and saw that the A15 scores around 1720 in the single-core test,
which is around a 10% gain vs the A14 chip which scored around 1570 points.
However, the leaked benchmarks for the multi-core performance
show a score of around 4600 compared to 3800 for the A14, which is around an 18 to 19% improvement.
Now this doesn’t really make sense because the 6-core layout of the
chip has stayed the same this year, and the only explanation
is that the efficiency cores themselves have gotten more powerful in the A15!
AAPL Tree did some calculations and found that with the old A14 chip,
the efficiency cores combined score around 700 points, and so he applied the same math to
the leaked A15 multi-core score of 4600 and he concluded that the efficiency cores should now
score around 1150 points by themselves, being much faster year over year!
And this is gonna give us a MAJOR benefit!
If the efficiency cores are faster, this means that they can handle more tasks by themselves
without the performance cores having to turn on at all,
which is gonna lead to major battery life improvements!
Now with that said, this finally brings me to an important realization
that brings me to my new theory about the A15.
The newly revealed single-core benchmarks for the A15 chip show a score of around 1740 points
with the performance core running at 3.23GHz clock speed.
And then I realized that this number seemed familiar so I looked at the benchmarks of
the M1 MacBooks, which scored around 1714-1721 points at a 3.2GHz clock speed, almost identical.
So here is my crazy theory, what if Apple simply took the performance cores from the M1 chip,
tweaked them up a bit by increasing the clock speed by 0.03GHz and then made tossed those cores
into the A15 chip alongside some other upgrades to the SoC like doubling the system cache?
That would explain why the single-core performance is just a tad bit faster than the M1,
and if you really think about it, the M1 cores are really just tweaked and improved A14 cores.
Now you might be saying, how is it possible for Apple to throw those insanely powerful
cores into the iPhone because obviously it is much smaller so it heats up a lot more than a MacBook?
Well, unlike the M1, the A15 chip is built on TSMC’s 5nm+ architecture,
so it’s more efficient and it doesn’t heat up as much.
But then there’s also the question of why Apple would reuse the M1 performance cores
in the first place instead of designing brand new entirely different performance cores?
Well, if you didn’t already know, for the past decade or so, Apple’s ARM cores have been
based on the ARMv8 architecture, and earlier this year, ARM has already announced ARMv9
with some massive improvements, which Apple will definitely take advantage of,
but the downside is that it won’t be ready to launch until next year.
So if you’re in Apple’s shoes, why would you spend time redesigning the performance
cores if you’re about to totally switch to the new ARMv9 architecture? By far,
the easiest solution is to just take those M1 cores, tweak them up a bit and toss them
into the A15 chip alongside some other new components which I’ll talk about in a second.
And to test that theory out, I crunched a bunch of numbers to see if
everything matches up and spoiler alert.. It does! So let’s get right into that.
First off, as we know, the m1 chip scores around 7500 in Geekbench 5’s multi-core
test compared to the A15 chip’s maximum score of 4874 in mrwhosetheboss’s video.
We also know that the M1 chip uses an 8-core layout compared to 6 on the A15,
so the M1 essentially has two extra performance cores.
We also know that the M1’s efficiency cores combined add around 700 points to the multi-core
test, due to previous calculations we made when we studied the M1 chip.
So if I grab the 7500 multi-core score that we got with our M1 MacBooks, and then minus 700
from the efficiency cores, we’re left with 6800 points between the M1’s four performance cores.
Now divide that by 4 and you get around 1700 points per performance core.
So now let’s try to recreate the A15 chip’s 6-core layout which includes two performance cores and
four efficiency cores and see if it matches up to the new iPhone 13 Pro Max score of 4874.
First, we take the 1700 points and multiply it by two performance cores, giving us 3,400 points.
Now, if we add in 700 points from the four efficiency cores, we now have a score of
4,100 points, which is disappointingly shy 774 points compared to the iphone 13 pro max.
However, we’re forgetting the most important detail!
According to AAPL tree, the efficiency cores are much faster this year, so if
we look at the multi-core score of the 13 Pro Max and minus out the two performance cores,
we’re left with 1376 points which the efficiency cores are adding by themselves!
So if we take the 3,400 points we got from the M1 chip and add 1376 points instead of
700 that the m1’s efficiency cores used to give us, we get a total multi-core score of 4,776,
which is within a margin of error from the score mrwhosetheboss showed us.
But wait, it gets even better because I did the same thing to the GPU cores as well!
When we benchmarked our M1 MacBook Pro
with the 8-core GPU, it scored as much as 22,000 points in Geekbench 5’s Metal test.
And as we know, the A15 chip comes with either a 4 core or a 5-core GPU.
So I took the 22,000 points from the M1 and divided it by 8 to get 2,750 points per GPU core.
If we multiply that number by 4 cores, we get 11,000 Metal points which almost perfectly matches
the Metal score in the regular iPhone 13’s 4-core GPU version of the A15 chip.
Now if we apply that same math to the 5-core version of the A15, we get a score of around
13,750 points, which is still shy of the 14,400 points from the new 5-core versions benchmarks.
However, if we go back to the AAPL tree’s article,
he pointed out that the GPU cores in the 5-core version of the A15 are actually clocked slightly
higher than the ones in the 4-core version, which would account for the extra difference.
But either way, the point I’m trying to make is that these scores in the A15 chip are matching
up so closely that we can basically confirm that the A15 is almost certainly using tweaked versions
of the M1’s CPU and GPU cores, with the biggest difference being the much faster efficiency cores.
Now I’m not trying to say that they’re the exact same cores just taken from the M1 and
thrown into the A15, because the efficiency cores are obviously much
faster, and the GPU cores are clocked slightly higher on the 5-core GPU version of the A15,
but they’re close enough that we can assume Apple just tweaked up the cores from the A14 and M1.
And if you think about it, Apple going with this approach actually
saves them a TON of engineering cost, having the A14,
the M1 and A15 chips all using basically the same cores, but with different tweaks to each one.
And if you think I’m crazy, I can actually prove this by examining the performance of the
iPad Air 4’s A14 chip, which uses the same 4-core GPU layout as the lower-end A15 chip.
Surprisingly, it actually scores as much as 12,500 Metal points in Geekbench 5,
which is higher than the 10,875 that the iPhone 13’s A15 chip is getting.
So somehow, last year’s 4-core A14 chip is outperforming the new 4-core A15 chip, which
doesn’t seem to make sense at all. But the truth is that they’re fundamentally the same cores,
Apple just went all out with the performance in the iPad Air and they toned down the performance
in the new iPhone 13 because it’s a smaller device that doesn’t handle heat as well.
But making things even more interesting, if you take the 12,500 graphics score from the Air and
double it to match the 8 GPU cores in the M1 chip, it scores around 25,000 metal points, but
for some reason, the M1 iPad Pro only scores up to around 22,000, which means that Apple had to tune
down the performance lower than what they’re technically capable of due to heat management.
But getting back to the A15 chip, of course we know its is technically a newly designed chip
because it comes with new features like a new image signal processor,
a new display engine, double the system cache,
a new neural engine that’s much faster than before, and new video encoders and decoders.
But it seems like Apple combined whatever new components they had with the tweaked versions of
the A14 & M1 cores to create the A15 chip design, including the new super fast efficiency cores.
And with that theory explained, now let me get into how
this perfectly matches up to rumors of the M1X chip.
Mark Gurman believes that the M1X chip will come with a new 10-core layout, with 8 performance
cores instead of four on the M1, but just two efficiency cores instead of the previous four.
And if you think it’s weird for Apple to ditch two of the efficiency cores because it
seems like battery life is at risk, remember that the new ones in the A15 chip are MUCH
faster, and we’re expecting those same efficiency cores to show up in the M1X.
And because those efficiency cores are faster, they should be able to handle more tasks without
having to turn on the performance cores at all, helping to save battery life.
So with that said, everything points to the M1X chip
being based on the cores from the M1 and A15 chips, and if that’s true,
here are some conservative estimates for the performance I’m expecting from the M1X chip.
On top of that, Apple will include the new much faster 16-core Neural Engine from the A15 chip
into the M1X, along with anything else that might be new from the A15, as well as Mac-exclusive
updates like changes to the Thunderbolt controller to allow more ports and display outputs.
Now as far as the future M2 chip, I personally believe that it’s gonna be coming next year,
and i think that it’s gonna debut with the M2 MacBook Air.
The biggest piece of evidence for this conclusion is an article from Mark Gurman
claiming that the redesigned MacBook Air would come with an M2 chip that
features the same amount of CPU cores as the M1, but with two additional GPU cores.
And since Apple is gonna be releasing the M1X MacBook Pros within the next two months,
it doesn’t make sense for the new M2 MacBook Air to come until next year.
And according to Ming-chi Kuo, this new MacBook Air is launching in mid-2022, which perfectly
lines up with Apple’s WWDC event in June, which would actually be the perfect event to reveal
the M2 chip since it’ll be two years since Apple announced the Apple Silicon transition.
I expect the M2 chip to come with brand new redesigned cores based on the new ARMV9
architecture and potentially built on a newer 4nm process node from TSMC. And then I expect
those exact cores to go into the A16 chip for the iPhone lineup.
So there you guys go, that was all of my conclusions for how Apple created the A15 chip
and how it’s actually based on the same cores as the M1 chip
with some added improvements like the faster neural engine and other stuff like that.
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