No iPhone 12 announced today, but Apple unveiled a new chip that will power the next generation of its hardware (including that phone whenever it’s launched). The A14 Bionic, which will ship first with the new iPad Air, is going to be Apple’s fastest yet.
Apple says that it will be the first to use five nanometer process technology, incredibly small-scale but powerful, with 11.8 billion transistors packed into the chip, up 40% on its previous generation seven nanometer chips. This will work out to 11 trillion operations per second.
This translates into a more efficient chip: more power with less battery consumption, with more processes run in parallel across a six-core design. Apple claims this will make the chip up to two times faster than the most popular Windows laptop, three times faster than the fastest Android tablet and six times faster than the fastest Chromebook.
This makes the iPad Air something that it will market the cheaper device not just at younger users but gamers and others that will heavily use their devices. Photo editing will be faster, and so will any analytical applications, with the chip also featuring a 16-core neural engine.
Chips are at the heart of how the consumer electronics industry compares, and the next generation of how that will play out will be very interesting indeed, with Nvidia this weekend announcing its intent to acquire ARM — an Apple partner — for $40 billion. ARM has positioned itself as a “Switzerland” in the industry, providing its designs to everyone on equal footing, but it has been increasingly taking on a more autonomous role in its chip design over the years, and this A14 is the latest product of that strategy.
More to come.