Recently, the dismantling of the iPhone 14 Pro series by various agencies and the cost estimates of various parts have come out one after another. The analysis of each agency points to the same problem. The cost of this year’s iPhone 14 Pro series is higher than last year’s iPhone 13 Pro series. The increase is about 20%, which continues to refresh the historical high of hardware costs.
Take a detailed analysis of Apple A16 Bionic Chip
Especially affected by the global inflation and global chip shortage this year, the new Apple A16 Bionic Chip is the first to bear the brunt of the increase in the hardware cost of the iPhone 14 Pro. The hardware cost has increased by 140%, which means that its cost is the same as last year’s A15. 2.4 times that of the bionic chip, reaching $110. This also understands to a certain extent that this year’s A16 Bionic Chip is only given to the iPhone 14 Pro series and the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus can only use the previous generation’s A15 Bionic chip.
At the iPhone 14 Series press conference, Apple only mentioned that its power consumption was reduced by 20% compared with the previous generation and the performance was not directly compared with the previous generation, but compared with the A13 chip of the previous year and this year’s competing products, which is faster. 40% in addition, the bandwidth of the GPU has been increased by 50%, and the computing power of the NPU has reached 17 trillion times per second (TOPS).
In fact, the A16 has been upgraded from the A15 of the previous generation TSMC 5nm (N5) process to the new 4nm (N4P) process. TSMC claims that the N4P process can improve the efficiency by 22% and the performance by 11%; while the A16 chip The number of transistors has increased from 15 billion to 16 billion, but the chip architecture design is similar, and they are all 6-core CPU + 5-core GPU + 16-core NPU.
For the more specific CPU part, the frequency of two large cores has been increased from 3.23GHz to 3.46GHz and the frequency of four small cores is still 2.02GHz. The frequency of GPU has been increased from 600MHz to 700MHz. The operation speed of NPU has been increased from 15.8 TOPS of the previous generation to 17 TOPS on the other hand, Apple has also upgraded the storage this time, from the previous LPDDR4X 4266Mbps to the faster LPDDR5 6400Mbps. It seems that the improvement in A16 performance mainly depends on the improvement of technology and core frequency, there are indeed several The feeling of squeezing toothpaste.
Recently, many organizations have used GeekBench 5 to test the iPhone 14 Pro’s benchmark data. The A16’s single-core and multi-core benchmark scores are about 7% to 9% higher than that of the A15, and the performance improvement is not as good as before. The power consumption improvement of A16 is relatively obvious.
