Exchanging speed for battery life, perhaps?
The iPhone makes up the bulk of Apple’s annual product revenue, so it’s fair to say that Tuesday’s announcement of the four new iPhone models is the most important Apple announcement of the year. But the importance goes beyond the iPhone itself because Tuesday was also the day that Apple announced the A15 Bionic, its next-generation processor.
These days, pretty much everything Apple builds—from Macs to iPads to iPhones—is powered by Apple-designed processors. The arrival of the A15 is the beginning of a new foundation for devices Apple will be releasing into 2023. Just as last year’s A14 processor was the basis for the M1—and possibly a souped-up M1X version in forthcoming MacBook Pros—the core design of the A15 will probably end up being used for future Macs and iPad Pro models.
The A15 is similar to the A14 in a lot of respects. Both chips feature a six-core processor design, with four high-efficiency cores and two high-performance cores. Most of the time, the energy-sipping cores do all the work, but in moments of need, the fast cores crank up and give Apple’s devices their peak performance. Both chips also feature a 16-core Neural Engine, optimized for machine-learning tasks like scanning photos for objects and faces.
The clear variation between the A14 and A15 is in graphics processing: While the A15 processor in the iPhone 13 has four GPU cores, just like the A14, the A15 processor used in the iPhone 13 Pro and the new iPad mini has five GPU cores.
Read more at MacWorld.com