Benchmarks: Apple’s A14 Bionic offers significant performance improvement over A13

Benchmarks for Apple’s new fourth generation iPad Air have appeared online, indicating the A14 Bionic expected to be used in the “iPhone 12” range offers more performance than the high-powered A13 Bionic and the iPad Pro’s A12Z Bionic.

Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider:

In benchmarks spotted by Twitter user “Ice Universe” offers what could be the first benchmark for the tablet, and a first glimpse of what could be powering the 2020 iPhone models.

A14’s first Geekbench 5 results appeared, single-core 1583, multi-core 4198, still the king. pic.twitter.com/HXMgEfjSuW

— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) October 3, 2020

The benchmark lists the chip as 6-core model with a base frequency of 2.99GHz and 3.66GB of memory. The tablet scored 1,583 points for single-core tests, while for multi-core it achieved 4,198 points, under Geekbench 5.2.3.

Comparing the results against Geekbench’s list of iOS and iPadOS devices, the single-core performance is higher than the 1,327 observed in the iPhone 11 Pro, which uses the A13 Bionic at 2.7Ghz. On the multi-core side, the A14 also outpaces the 3,300 the A13 Bionic achieves in the same test, but is still beaten by the A12Z Bionic used in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which scored 4,644 points.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple describes the A14 Bionic thusly, “Using breakthrough 5-nanometer process technology, A14 Bionic is packed with 11.8 billion transistors for increased performance and power efficiency in nearly every part of the chip. This latest-generation A-series chip features a new 6-core design for a 40 percent boost in CPU performance, and a new 4-core graphics architecture for a 30 percent improvement in graphics. To deliver breakthrough machine learning capabilities, A14 Bionic includes a new 16-core Neural Engine that is twice as fast, and capable of performing up to 11 trillion operations per second, taking machine learning apps to a whole new level. A14 Bionic also includes second-generation machine learning accelerators in the CPU for 10 times faster machine learning calculations. This combination of the new Neural Engine, CPU machine learning accelerators, and high-performance GPU enables powerful on-device experiences for image recognition, natural language learning, analyzing motion, and more.”