Between happened The iPad Air was introduced last month With the new A14 chip from Apple andAdvertising for iPhone 12 Which marked the A14 Bionic chip itself, some Apple officials spoke out about the technology behind the A14 and the company's overall chip strategy.
Tim Millet, Apple Vice President of Platform Engineering, and Tom Boger, Senior Director, Mac and iPad Marketing, demonstrated how Apple has leveraged its ability to customize its own chipsets to focus on both energy efficiency and performance. By switching to the 5nm technology in the A14 and increasing the number of transistors, there is more space to develop higher performance efficiency and work with less energy.
Unsurprisingly, this year's Neural Engine in the A14 is a far cry from the first neural engine we saw on the A11 in 2017. In the A11 it could produce 600 billion calculations per second, and in the A13 last year it raised the barrier to 6. One trillion operations in the same time period. While the A14 achieved a quantum leap by performing 11 trillion calculations per second.
And speaking of the internal structure of A14, the 5-nanometer technology has increased the number of transistors to nearly 12 trillion transistors, and the Neural Engine in A14 now contains 16 cores, compared to eight in A13 last year. This boost opened up more room for Apple with a fanciful redesign.
Doubling the basic number of neural engine cores was a very important choice for Apple, since many of the features of the iOS operating system that depend on the neuromodulator in general became working beyond expectations and we saw this in an event IPhone 12 launched. And Apple took advantage of the topic and allocated more of those new transistors to increase the performance of the CPU and GPU, which is what software developers may notice immediately in high performance using less power.
Millet quotes: “We found the opportunity to do things that were impossible to do with the traditional set of instructions for the CPU. In theory, now in the A14 you can do many of the things that the Neural Engine does on the GPU when you cannot. He did this inside a tight, thermally bound container as was the case before the 5nm technology. ''
Apple's vision and style and “Think Different”
“We spend a lot of time working with production and software teams, and at the same time, the array of chip architecture is already in the middle of it all,” Millet says, “After all, we want to make sure that when we build the new CPU for a new generation of Apple devices. We certainly do not build it for one generation only, this does not mean that you will see the six-core CPU from the A14 in something like the Apple Watch in the future, but rather that the architecture that has been developed for the company's main iPhone chipset may be adapted and reused in Another place and another time.
How can this creativity be transferred to other devices?
There are many rumors talking about the new iPad Pro iPad Pro, which some expect to be released in early 2021, and these rumors said that this device will work with a high-performance version of the A14 chip, which may be called the A14X.
This is really not strange to Apple, as the company announced in 2018 the third generation of the iPad Pro and the A12X chipset, just one month after the launch of the iPhone XS series that works with the A12 chip.
What's more interesting here - and this is the part we have to take seriously - is also rumored that the A14X will be the chipset used inside the first Macs with Apple Silicon chips that will be commercially available to users very soon.
Of course, Apple will not confirm any of this yet, but when Millet was asked whether the company's work on Mac chips had affected in one way or another the development of the A14, which we saw in the new iPad Air, and is expected to be seen today in the iPhone 12, he indicated "Sometimes the unique basic system boundaries are what drives the new and distinctive creativity strands."
Conclusion
There's still a lot we don't know about the A14 and Apple's plans for it in the near future.
How will it be expanded or restricted to work with various other devices?
Does what Apple learned from the design of its mobile chipset as in the A14 give it the tools it needs to outperform the widespread (Intel) and (AMD) chipsets?
But what seems to us that there is one thing is clear, whether you buy the new iPad Air or even the iPhone 12, you will feel the big difference in everything Apple has worked on to develop these chipsets to be the basis for a future paradigm shift and a new leap in the world of fast-paced technology.
The author of the article: Engineer Samer Abdel Wahab and Wahib
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