The Apple A14 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 ...

ARMv8.4-A system on a chip (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 appears in the iPad Air (4th generation) and iPad (10th generation), as well as iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max. Apple states that the central processing unit (CPU) performs up to 40% faster than the A12, while the graphics processing unit (GPU) is up to 30% faster than the A12. It also includes a 16-core neural engine and new machine learning matrix accelerators that perform twice and ten times as fast, respectively.

Design

The Apple A14 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 Firestorm and four energy-efficient cores called Icestorm. The A14 integrates an Apple-designed four-core GPU with 30% faster graphics performance than the A12. The A14 includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a new 16-core Neural Engine. The Neural Engine can perform 11 trillion operations per second. In addition to the separate Neural Engine, the A14 CPU includes second-generation machine learning matrix scalar multiplication accelerators (which Apple calls AMX blocks). The A14 also includes a new image processor with improved computational photography capabilities. A14 is manufactured by

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...

on their first-generation 5 nm fabrication process, N5. This makes the A14 the first commercially available product to be manufactured on a 5 nm process node. The transistor count has increased to 11.8 billion, a 38.8% increase from the A13's transistor count of 8.5 billion. According to Semianalysis, the die size of A14 processor is 88 mm², with a transistor density of 134 million transistors per mm². It is manufactured in a

package on package Package on a package (PoP) is an integrated circuit packaging method to vertically combine ball grid array (BGA) packages for discrete logic and Semiconductor memory, memory. Two or more packages are installed atop each other, i.e. stacked, with a ...

(PoP) together with 4 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone 12 and 6 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone 12 Pro. The A14 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 ...

and H.264. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, and Motion JPEG. The A14 would be later used as the basis for the M1 series of chips, used in various

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

and

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

models.

Products that include the Apple A14 Bionic

* iPad (10th generation) * iPad Air (4th generation) * iPhone 12 & 12 Mini * iPhone 12 Pro & 12 Pro Max

Variants

The table below shows the various SoCs based on the "Firestorm" and "Icestorm" microarchitectures.

References

{{Application ARM-based chips Computer-related introductions in 2020 Apple silicon

Design

Products that include the Apple A14 Bionic

Variants

See also

References