The Apple A15 Bionic is a

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

ARM-based

system on a chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or Electronics, electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with computer memory, ...

(SoC) designed by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

, part of the

Apple silicon Apple silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture family, ARM architecture. They are used in nearly all of the company's devices including Mac ...

series. It is used in the iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max,

iPad Mini (6th generation) The sixth-generation iPad Mini (stylized and marketed as iPad mini and colloquially referred to as iPad Mini 6) is a tablet computer in the iPad Mini line, developed and marketed by Apple Inc. It was announced on September 14, 2021, and releas ...

, iPhone SE (3rd generation), iPhone 14 and 14 Plus and Apple TV 4K (3rd generation).

Design

The Apple A15 Bionic features an Apple-designed 64-bit six-core CPU implementing

ARMv8 ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and lice ...

with two high-performance cores called Avalanche running at 3.24 GHz and four energy-efficient cores called Blizzard running at 2.01 GHz. Apple claims the A15 in the iPhones is 50% faster than the competition. Apple claims the A15 in the iPad Mini 6 is 40% faster than the A12. An in-depth breakdown by

Anandtech ''AnandTech'' was an online computer hardware magazine owned by Future plc. It was founded in April 1997 by then-14-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi, who was CEO and editor-in-chief until August 2014, with Ryan Smith replacing him as editor-in-chief. ...

revealed that "compared to the A14, the new A15 increases the peak single-core frequency of the two-performance core cluster by 8%, now reaching up to 3240MHz compared to the 2998MHz of the previous generation. When both performance cores are active, their operating frequency goes up by 10%, both now running at 3180MHz compared to the previous generation’s 2890MHz". The A15 contains 15 billion transistors, a 27.1% increase from the A14's transistor count of 11.8 billion. It includes dedicated

neural network A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...

hardware that Apple calls a new 16-core Neural Engine. The Neural Engine can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, faster than A14's 11 trillion operations per second (+ 43%). The A15 also includes a new

image processor An image processor, also known as an image processing engine, image processing unit (IPU), or image signal processor (ISP), is a type of media processor or specialized digital signal processor (DSP) used for image processing, in digital cameras o ...

(ISP) with improved computational photography capabilities. Apple also boosted performance by doubling the system cache to 32MB. The A15 has video codec encoding support for

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In co ...

, H.264, and ProRes (iPhone 13 Pro only). It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, ProRes, and Motion JPEG. A15 is manufactured by TSMC, reportedly on their second-generation 5 nm fabrication process, N5P.

GPU

The A15 integrates an Apple-designed five-core GPU for the

iPad mini (6th generation) The sixth-generation iPad Mini (stylized and marketed as iPad mini and colloquially referred to as iPad Mini 6) is a tablet computer in the iPad Mini line, developed and marketed by Apple Inc. It was announced on September 14, 2021, and releas ...

, iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max,

iPhone 14 The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus are smartphones developed and marketed by Apple Inc. They are the List of iPhone models, sixteenth-generation iPhones, succeeding the iPhone 13, iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Mini, and were announced during List of Ap ...

and 14 Plus and

Apple TV Apple TV is a digital media player and a microconsole developed and marketed by Apple. It is a small piece of networking hardware that sends received media data such as video and audio to a TV or external display. Its media services include ...

4K (3rd generation), though in the Apple TV variant one efficiency CPU core is disabled. One GPU core is disabled in the iPhone SE (3rd generation), and iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, resulting in a four-core GPU for these models.

Products

Products that include the Apple A15 Bionic are: * iPhone 13 & 13 Mini – 6-core CPU and 4-core GPU * iPhone 13 Pro & 13 Pro Max – 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU * iPhone SE (3rd generation) – 6-core CPU and 4-core GPU * iPhone 14 & 14 Plus – 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU *

– 5-core GPU; CPU underclocked to 2.92 GHz from 3.23 GHz * Apple TV 4K (3rd generation) – 5-core GPU and 5-core CPU (Binned A15 with 1 efficiency CPU core disabled)

Variants

The table below shows the various SoCs based on the "Avalanche" and "Blizzard" microarchitectures.

References

{{Application ARM-based chips Computer-related introductions in 2021 Apple silicon

Design

GPU

Products

Variants

See also

References