The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster & More Efficient
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 4, 2021 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Apple
- Smartphones
- Apple A15
Conclusion & End Remarks
Today’s investigation into the new A15 is just scratching the tip of the iceberg of what Apple has to offer in the new generation iPhone 13 series devices. As we’re still working on the full device review, we got a good glimpse of what the new silicon is able to achieve, and what to expect from the new devices in terms of performance.
On the CPU side of things, Apple’s initial vague presentation of the new A15 improvements could either have resulted in disappointment, or simply a more hidden shift towards power efficiency rather than pure performance. In our extensive testing, we’re elated to see that it was actually mostly an efficiency focus this year, with the new performance cores showcasing adequate performance improvements, while at the same time reducing power consumption, as well as significantly improving energy efficiency.
The efficiency cores of the A15 have also seen massive gains, this time around with Apple mostly investing them back into performance, with the new cores showcasing +23-28% absolute performance improvements, something that isn’t easily identified by popular benchmarking. This large performance increase further helps the SoC improve energy efficiency, and our initial battery life figures of the new 13 series showcase that the chip has a very large part into the vastly longer longevity of the new devices.
In the GPU side, Apple’s peak performance improvements are off the charts, with a combination of a new larger GPU, new architecture, and the larger system cache that helps both performance as well as efficiency.
Apple’s iPhone component design seems to be limiting the SoC from achieving even better results, especially the newer Pro models, however even with that being said and done, Apple remains far above the competition in terms of performance and efficiency.
Overall, while the A15 isn’t the brute force iteration we’ve become used to from Apple in recent years, it very much comes with substantial generational gains that allow it to be a notably better SoC than the A14. In the end, it seems like Apple’s SoC team has executed well after all.
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Transistor Fist - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
The urge to implement better cooling solutions is only matched by their impressive y-o-y improvements. If they continue like this, their systems will melt like butter in Cupertino summer.michael2k - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
What are you talking about? Did you read the same article I read? The power/performance of the chips are superb and should allow the Macs, with their larger heat absorbing and dissipating systems, to stay amazingly cool. It’s unlikely Apple will release a 5GHz MBP with this chip.cha0z_ - Tuesday, October 5, 2021 - link
With that PCB design it will be hard to implement any cooling solution that will provide any real difference, especially with the limited space in their phones to even fit the said cooling. I don't really feel they are not doing more because of laziness or to milk people, I really do feel they test a lot and the current solution provides the best balance between power/speed/thermals.name99 - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
I know you, reader, are not so shallow! But for everyone else out there who just wants a straight-out cage match result, the SPEC2017 numbers for Rocket Lake (same methodology) are here:https://www.anandtech.com/show/16535/intel-core-i7...
It's unfortunate that those results don't show us how much extra AVX-512 (compiler created) gives, but presumably not enough that anyone thinks doing things that way is an outrage. But, quite possibly, most the action in compiler-generated AVX512 would be in the Fortran benchmarks anyway so...
The other caveat in a comparison (apart from Andre's point re Fortran) is that this is the iPhone chip being benchmarked; one suspects the mac chip will, if nothing else, have a larger (shared) L2, perhaps also a larger SLC, perhaps (???) LP-DDR5, and probably another 10% or so higher GHz.
name99 - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
Someone shared with me some rough AVX512 results compared with AVX2, and there's nothing there. A few small improvements, mostly regressions (presumably frequency limiting).I was trying to be fair in the comment above, that possibly with AVX512 Intel would look a little better -- but it honestly doesn't seem that way; with compiler-generated AVX512 in fact Intel looks essentially the same to very slightly worse.
Spunjji - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Apple are making the right choice moving to their own architectures.TristanSDX - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
PLS, Alder Lake pre-release reviewname99 - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
"we theorised that the company might possibly invested into energy efficiency rather than performance increases this year"Another way to phrase this which puts the emphasis slightly in a different place, is to assume that the A14 was in fact a rush job, and that in particular physical optimization for N5 was barely performed (hence both sub-optimal transistor usage, and sub-optimal density), and this year more such physical optimization could be performed.
The Tech Insights high-res A15 die shots are now out, so people who like to do this sort of thing can get to pixel measuring and calculating relative sizes. My quick and dirty estimates (based on early numbers, not the current die shot) are that density increased about 7%. That hardly gets us to the maximum possible density TSMC suggests for N5, but does suggest that some fraction of the surprisingly low A14 density was simply lack of time to optimize.
mukiex - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
This is awesome! I was worried we wouldn't get an iPhone SoC review, but a review of JUST the SoC? I'm 100% on board with this being Anandtech's approach moving forward.eastcoast_pete - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
Thanks Andrei! As a long-time Android user, one of the most frustrating aspects of current and future stock-ARM SoCs (currently, pretty much all Android phones) was the decision by ARM to keep the efficiency cores as in-order designs. Your tests of the current Apple SoC alongside the 888 and Exynos show just how much energy efficiency was left on the table with the A55. I know that ARM claims that their new efficiency core design is improved over the A55, but, as it remains in-order, I don't see how they can get even close to the efficiency cores in Apple's SoC.The simple truth is that being able to run mostly on the efficiency cores has great upsides for battery life. In this regard, I applaud Apple: have the high performance on the large cores when needed, keep the rest on the efficiency cores if possible without ruining the user experience.