A15 Bionic vs A14 Bionic – What is the Difference Between the Chips?

Each year, Apple holds three to four events. They are held during the months of March, and during June, with the Worldwide Developers Conference. In the month of September, the event is centered around the Apple Watch and the iPhone.

At times, the maker also has an event during the month of October with the release of the iPad or the MacBook. Due to the pandemic and the current market scenario, we are witnessing a massive shortage of components for manufacturing the chips.

Still, famous makers like Intel, AMD, and Apple are running the show with whatever they have left, not to annoy the consumers. From 2019 onwards, there has been a surge in demand for processors.

In this comparison review, we will be taking a look at two phenomenal chips that are produced by Apple. They are A15 Bionic vs A14 Bionic chip processors. The A15 chip is what you find in the iPad Mini, and it is extremely powerful.

This is what makes the iPad Mini powerful and sellable. Otherwise, we do not think that the iPad Mini would have been on Apple shelves globally at all. It comes with interesting specifications like a more extensive system cache and a new image signal processor.

There is a new display engine, a new Video Encoder/Decoder, and a secure enclave. You can find better compression. We strongly feel that the manufacturer is underselling the performance of its new A15 Bionic chip.

This is because of the in-depth benchmarks and analysis of the iPhone 13 scores that are pointing to having considerable power. You would be delighted to know that there is a hefty improvement on the A14 chip.

A notable thing about Apple here is that during the iPhone 13 release, they compared the model with its competition and not the earlier generation units. Maybe a hint of confidence and little arrogance.

But that is what you need when you want to rule the market. The A15 Bionic chip is more than 50% quicker than the leading rival chips. Besides, it has a 30% better graphical performance on the four-core GPU, which is almost more than 50% for the five-core unit.

This goes to show how much it has improved on the A14 Bionic chip. The A14 Bionic chip, too, comes with decent features infused in it. You can find a comprehensive range of specifications that make it still operate in the market.

As in the past, we have seen, merely speed won’t tick all the requirements. You need to be able to put in more than just that. Let us read this review to find out the architecture, performance, pros & cons of both chips to understand them better. We have mentioned the winner at the end of the post.

A15 Bionic	A14 Bionic
PROS	PROS
The specifications are incredible on the chip. It is designed 64-bit six-core CPU. It implements ARMv8 with two high-performance cores, Avalanche. The unit has four energy-efficient cores called Blizzard at 2.01 GHz. The chip provides a 19% improvement over the A14 chip.	The specifications are fantastic on the chip. The higher 1.8 GHz clock speed and 3.01 GHz boost capability. It is faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. The chip performs 30% better than the A12Z for single-core tasks. It is ideal for playing games with a smooth performance.
CONS	CONS
The chip is expensive.	The model is costly.

Pricing & availability

The Apple iPad Mini with the A15 Bionic chip is priced under $500. They go up to $800 based on the specifications and features you are looking for. This is due to the fact that the lower process node for the A16 Bionic makes use of the TSMC’s 3nm process node.

The Apple iPad Air with the A14 Bionic chip is priced under $500. Similarly, it goes up to $800 depending on the specifications and the features that you want. As you may know, the size and capabilities of the iPad Mini are much lesser than the iPad Air.

Architecture & specifications

We will read about the architecture & specifications of the A15 and the A14 Bionic chips. This will give us an idea of their capabilities. You would be surprised to know that the A14 Bionic chip is still used on most of Apple smartphones.

The design of the A15 Bionic chip is the way it should be. The maker has stated that the chip is 50% faster than the competition. It may be true in terms of Apple standards, but we do not have any solid evidence with us to back it up.

The A15 is a 64-bit ARM-based SoC that is produced with the SMC’s 5nm manufacturing node. According to the maker, the newer chips will come with enhanced architectural improvements due to a performance-enhanced version of a 5nm process known as the N5P.

This makes the model the first chipset from Apple to be made using the N5P FinFET technology. Besides, they also infused more transistors into the unit. You would be amazed to know that it has 15 billion transistors and 11.8 billion to the A14 model.

The core count of the A15 is way higher than the A14 too. You can find that the former unit has a maximum of 6 cores, with 2 high-performance cores (codenamed Avalanche). You can also note that it has 4 energy-efficient cores (codenamed Blizzard).

Though these specifications are more or less similar to the earlier model, they are much higher than their predecessor. Using the cores, you can get a maximum frequency per core of close to 3,240 MHz.

There is also an 8% improvement in single-core performance for the two-core cluster. It has the E-cores clock around 2.0 GHz & P-cores clocked at around 3.2 GHz. In this case, the A14 Bionic chip got a maximum boost clock of 3.1GHz on its performance and 1.8 GHz on the energy-efficient cores.

The A14 chips come with a similar architecture, and their specifications are almost the same. So, we are not going through it in detail. Using the cores, you can get a maximum frequency per core of 2,998.

All in all, you may not see an abundance of performance differences because they are similar. Your gaming performance will be good, the apps will open quickly, and things may move smoothly.

CPU Performance

Gaming Performance

Battery life

Performance & overclocking

Now, we will be reading about the performance & overclocking abilities of the A15 & the A14 Bionic chips. This would be able to give you clear hindsight of what to expect from these two chips and may help you decide on which model you should make use of for your requirement.

The A15 Bionic chip’s performance & overclocking abilities are much better than that of the A14 Bionic chip. Having said that, the efficiency cores have an improvement of up to 10.5% with a maximum frequency of 2,016MHz.

It is not surprising the fact that Apple is going from the 16MB found in the A14 to the 32MB found in the A15. We did a latency test to confirm this and were pleasantly surprised to know that the system cache has been increased.

The model has also kept the memory accesses on the same silicon for a longer duration of time. However, the L2 cache of the performance cores is the same. This has increased by 50% to 12MB blending with the M1.

You will want to know that the efficiency cores are similar to the 64KB L1D and 4MB shared L2 caches. However, the L2 TLB has been enhanced to 2,048 entries for it to cover up to 32MB. You can also find it has quicker DRAM access for the efficiency cores.

We are delighted to inform you that the performance tests showed what we had expected in the first place. Not to mention, the power consumed was pretty much less than we thought. This is an overall increase in power compared to that of the A14 Bionic chip.

The four-core GPU found in the A14 unit was 14% slower than that of the A15. So, you may want to consider that. Besides, the A15 model had managed a 30% improvement. This is something that you would like to take into consideration before choosing the chip.

In the A14 Bionic chip, the performance & overclocking were what it was. Obviously, we can’t expect many changes to that. The model is 21% slower than that of the A15 Bionic model found in the market.

Initially, we thought the A14 unit GPU would offer a 55% graphical improvement over the model. You can double the SLC (System Level Cache) from 16MB to 32MB to get a better chip model, and that is what they have done.

You can find noticeable improvements in the chipset when you test the batteries, which is a good thing. According to a user of the iPhone 12 Pro Max smartphone, he got around more than 8 hours in a YouTube video streaming test.

However, the iPhone 13 Pro Max smartphone was able to last for more than 10 hours in the same YouTube live-streaming test. So, if you are looking at the battery life as well, then you know what to do now.

From the above, it becomes evident that the A15 Bionic chip is much quicker than the A14 Bionic chip. It comes with enhanced GPU and CPU cores. That means when you operate a laptop using the A15 Bionic chip, you can expect it to perform better than the A14 Bionic chip.

Benchmarks Performance

AnTuTu 9

GeekBench 5 (Single-Core)

GeekBench 5 (Multi-Core)

3DMark

Summing Up

If you are currently using a few-year-old device like a smartphone or tablet, then you might as well update to the A15 smartphone or tablet. It will do you well. That is because it can provide you with significant enhancements in terms of performance and capability.

But when you own a year or two-year-old device, then it makes no point in upgrading as of now. However, the A14 and the A15 Bionic chip models can have excellent performance differences.

They are above the rest of the chips that are currently sold in the market. You could be somebody looking to upgrade to a new Apple device. When that is the case, then here is your chance to do so.

For information’s sake, Samsung R& D is also on top of its game producing unique processors that are better than the A15 Bionic chip. You read it correctly. The Exynos 2100 has an AI Engine, Triple-core NPU, and DSP to perform 26 TOPS effortlessly.

We can say that the Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100 are ahead of the A15 Bionic chip in terms of AI and ML operations. In the end, it is going to be your call. You can opt to use either the A14 Bionic chip unit or the A15 Bionic chip model for yourself.

FAQs

Verdict

Our winner in this comparison review between the A15 Bionic vs A14 Bionic chips is the A15 unit. There was no doubt about that right from the beginning itself. However, this comparison review brought about so many factors and specifications that we did not know about.

Besides, it also highlighted some of the best uses of the A14 Bionic chip. For regular users, we felt that the A14 unit is more than sufficient. The Apple A14 Bionic chip has a 600MHz faster GPU clock speed & an 8MB bigger L2 cache than the A15 Bionic chip.

The Apple A15 Bionic chip comes with a faster CPU speed, a higher multi-core Geekbench 5 result, and a higher single-core Geekbench 5 result. The chip has 3200 million more transistors. Though the A15 Bionic chip is much quicker, faster, and better than the A14 Bionic chip, the cost factor will always be on the minds of the user.

Are you willing to spend almost double on the A15 Bionic chip? If then, it is okay, you can go ahead and do just that. However, when you want to settle down for a decent chip, then the A14 Bionic is just good enough for you to be able to see through your regular tasks with ease.

The choice is entirely yours. We hope that you benefited from this comparison post. Apple products are always in demand because of their reliability, durability, and phenomenal specifications over others.

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