Apple A14

Apple A14

Developer

Apple Inc.

Announced

September 15, 2020

Released

October 23, 2020

Features

4 high-efficiency CPU cores
4
16

2 high-performance CPU cores4 high-efficiency CPU cores GPU cores16 Neural Engine cores

Specs

11.8 billion transistors

3.1 GHz base clock rate 11.8 billion transistors

Predecessor

Apple A13 Bionic

Successor

Apple A15 Bionic

The Apple A14 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC), designed by Apple Inc. It was announced on September 15, 2020 and released the following October 23rd for the fourth generation iPad Air and the iPhone 12 series. Apple states that the CPU performs up to 40% faster than the A12, while the GPU is up to 30% faster than the A12. It also includes a 16-core neural engine and new machine learning matrix accelerators that performs twice and ten times as fast, respectively.[1][2]

Design

The Apple A14 Bionic features an Apple-designed 64-bit six-core CPU implementing ARMv8 ISA, with two high-performance cores called Firestorm and four energy-efficient cores called Icestorm.

The A14 integrates an Apple-designed four-core graphics processing unit (GPU) with 30% faster graphics performance than the A12.[1] The A14 includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a new 16-core Neural Engine.[1] The Neural Engine can perform 11 trillion operations per second.[1] In addition to the separate Neural Engine, the A14 includes second-generation machine learning matrix accelerators in the CPU.[1]

History

The A14 is manufactured to Apple’s design specifications by TSMC through their first generation 5 nm process, making it the first commercially available product to be fabricated at 5 nm.[3] The transistor count was increased to 11.8 billion.[4] Apple had been anticipated to introduce new Macs based on the A14,[5] but instead introduced the faster Apple M1 in November 2020.[6]

Products that include the Apple A14 Bionic

References