What you need to know
- AnandTech has conducted a detailed review of the iPhone 13's A15 Bionic chip.
- Turns out the new processor is even faster than Apple claimed.
- AT says the new chip is 62% faster than the competition, with huge efficiency and graphic performance gains.
New insight and analysis into the iPhone 13's A15 Bionic chip has revealed the processor beats the competition by even more than Apple first let on.
AnandTech's review of the A15 chip notes that whilst Apple's tone around the A15 painted a "rather conservative improvement" the results were "anything but that."
Following extensive tests, AT concluded that Apple's focus this year was on efficiency improvements, with efficiency cores seeing "massive gains" of +23-28% absolute performance, and that the processor is actually way better than Apple led us to believe:
Compared to the competition, the A15 isn't +50 faster as Apple claims, but rather +62% faster. While Apple's larger cores are more power hungry, they're still a lot more energy efficient. Granted, we are seeing a process node disparity in favour of Apple. The performance and efficiency of the A15 E-cores also put to shame the rest of the pack. The extremely competent performance of the 4 efficiency cores alongside the leading performance of the 2 big cores explain the significantly better multi-threaded performance than the 1+3+4 setups of the competition.
AnandTech described the GPU performance of the new A15 as "off the charts" thanks to a series of improvements stating "the A15 continues to cement Apple's dominance in mobile gaming" and that visual fidelity on iPhone was so much better than competing Android phones that benchmarking the two wasn't even fair to begin with.
In fact, the only criticism the review threw up was that Apple could have done even more with A15, which is limited by component design. Clearly Apple's new best iPhone is a big jump in performance over the A14 of the iPhone 12.
