iPhone 13 and Apple Silicon

Ben Bajarin, writing at Creative Strategies:

While I will admit there is a small percentage of Apple customers who upgrade every year and a percentage more who upgrade every two years because they are on upgrade plans, the vast majority of consumers upgrade every 3-4 years. I thought it would be interesting to look at some basic iPhone benchmarks through the years and look at how much performance improvement happens every four years.

Incremental improvements every year turn into profound improvements over 3–4 years. It’s like the technology version of compound interest. It adds up.

As I benchmarked the A15 Bionic in different ways and pondered how Apple spends its transistor budget with each A-series chip cycle, an interesting shift emerged for iPhone 13. Going back to how Apple spends their transistor budget on features, not necessarily performance, for the A15, Apple looks to have had the most GPU gains YoY since the A9. For the past five years, Apple has had an average of 19% GPU gains YoY but for the A15 Bionic, Apple has increased GPU performance by 52%.

This intentional increase in GPU performance over CPU performance speaks to the more graphically intense features Apple had in mind for iPhone 13 that is demonstrated in things like macro photography, macro video, and Cinematic Mode. Developers also now have a dramatically increased GPU at their disposal to create new app experiences around and can leverage new augmented reality techniques, visual computing and AI, and more.

It’s almost enough to make one think that Apple is ready to release high-end professional Macs built around Apple GPUs.

★ Wednesday, 22 September 2021