4nm is more branding than anything else. It’s frankly an optimised version of N5P, which was an optimised version of the original 5nm from TSMC. The “real” node changes will come with 3nm which should see a noticeable perf/watt bump across the board

I think we have reached a point on the iPhone and iPad where we have topped out the performance needed in a chip that the device/software can even take advantage of. Like the A16 in iPhone and M1 in the iPad will be all anyone needs for years, where a new chip won't even make a difference in day-to-day day usage, even in high-performance use cases for those devices for a long time. Thoughts?

I think we can safely say, 3nm will be a huge leap forward. In tsmc we trust.

Another reason for focusing their comparisons on the A13 is that there is a larger group of existing customers with 2-3 year old iPhones to tempt with the A16 than with the 1 year old A15, most of whom will probably wait another 12 months before upgrading.

Great breakdown Luke! However won’t the 3nm out next gen have cooler operation and maybe better battery life??

This is a really in depth and well-done review. Apple obviously needs to market something "new" every year, so 4nm. Now there is also the point that pumping out more power from this chip would cause even worse battery life, at least, in this current form factor ;)

It's not too confusing, N4 is very much in the N5 family with clock speed improvements for the same wattage or else power reductions or a combination of both. A16 largely improved by clock speed increases. N3 we should see a bigger architecture change.

I LOVED the quality of this video!! Those b-roll takes are amazing!! Great content and quality, my favorite KZfaqr so far! I salute you from Argentina!

In the last two generations, the main factor that made especially the CPU P-cores faster has been the frequency increases thanks to newer nodes and other architectural tweaks, as we haven't seen much architectural / instructions per clock improvements. On the other hand, the E-cores cores have been improved more significantly in terms of IPC with A15, and the freq. increase it's gotten seems to be more major w/ the A16 than the P-cores. That does mean the E-cores will draw a little more power, but because of its higher performance the P-cores will also need to be activated less, which will most likely offset the power increase for everyday battery life. The biggest factor that will improve the multicore CPU and GPU performance this year will be the fact that A16 switches to LPDDR5 memory from LPDDR4X. And the higher memory bandwidth will improve multithreaded CPU perf. more than singlethreaded perf. because as all of those cores are working hard there will be a bigger strain on the memory bus and the higher bandwidth will help with congestion, think of it like how a wider highway wouldn't help an individual car go much faster, but if there are other cars on the road individual cores will need to slow down much less. And of course higher memory bandwidth will help the GPU the most as graphics is way more parallelized than CPU work. The difference in density between N5P (or N5, since N5P and N5's density is the same, N5P is only a power reduction / freq. improvement, so any more transistors Apple added when they switched to N5P resulted in an increase in die size, but die size increase doesn't necessarily mean an according linear power increase) and N4 is only 4%, and only in logic cells, cache cell density is the same.

I'd actually be more interested in the performance per watt rather than the performance per core. Maybe it would tell a different story since there have been suspicions that the macbook cores were overclocked compared the the iphone.

I have the moon climber for 14 pro max, absolutely love it - the kickstand is a must-have ❤

Another grrrreaaat video! Second vid recently that i find spot on, talking about what I actually want to hear. Thanks!

Nice camera moves man!

P.S. I’m loving your videos lately, and would looooove to hear your thoughts on the current iPad mini. Do you have a review video on that? I can’t seem to find it. 😢

Thank you for great reviews. I like your channel. Big 👍🏻

It was reported the 4nm node is actually a modified 5nm node. The jump to 3nm should have the generational die shrink benefits that we have seen in previous die shrinks.

Something I wonder is...how much does year over year improvements really matter? How much improvement is Qualcomm making every year with their chips? From the 888 to the 8 gen1, was there a significant performance improvement?

Gary Explains it just the A15 with some tweaks. Which means they could have put this chop in every model. But they didn't so they could resell you last years phones that are stuck ok the shelf that they didn't sell.

Torras are fantastic cases and the only ones that I trust to protect my iPhone and those of my family. Kudos! (first time I have ever commented on a sponsor or advert). Now back to the video....

I feel things like the neural engine, encoders, ISP is probably as important in the A16 as the CPU yang GPU. But 14% better single core year over year is honestly more than I expected. It's a shame that the battery life is apparently worse than the iPhone 13 Pro though. I wonder if that's due to the A16 or perhaps other factors.

Great video thanks Luke!

I am glad that I am not the only one having difficulties cleaning between the cameras.

can you make a video on all interactions with dynamic island? - when timer and music are running, what happens when you start a yt video - does dynamic island shows up in lockscreen - any other you can think of?

Tell me where to get that lamp fam!!

All very technical - I just want to know is the 16 percentage wise faster than the 15. Is it worth the money? Torras cases were a good tip and thanks for the links.

Your camera setup is different now you have a cameraman, it makes the video better, keep going 🙏

The more iPhone 14 Pro content this man creates and uploads, the more I realize how smart it was to keep my 13 Pro and skip this year. Thank You 🙏 Sir

Nice camera moves, did u get a fancy motorised slider?

What's the iPhone 14 Modem? Is it Qualcomm x55? or Qualcomm x65? iPhone 14 Pro(& Pro Max) has Qualcomm x65 modem, but what's in iPhone 14 base. Thank you.

I think the main difference is clockspeed. A14 was the original 5nm chip, A15 had higher clock and new efficiency core I think plus one more gpu core on the pro made on the optimized 5n plus node, A16 higher clock on the further optimized 4n node which actually still is the same 5nm process. Bigger changes probably coming with the 3nm node which is a new process.

It is strange you didnt mention the cpu clock difference so real improvement is the performance difference not counting cpu clock change

I dont think we will get an idea of improvements in the A-Series chips until we see the performance gap between M2 and M3 that will serve as an index mark for the refences A17 and beyond.

can you make a behind the scenes video on how you make these videos?

I seems like Apple just took the A15 and manufactured it on the new 4nm without optimising it for that node.

I think you could’ve done more by comparing clockspeed etc. I thought I’ll get more of this video. Still a great channel.

I wish we could configure more gpu cores and more ram on the 14 pro

Great video, while I usually don't comment on videos, I had to on this one. Really loving the camera movements, they add so much to the video, it keeps the viewer hooked and entertained. Would love to see more of this!

We will have to wait for software update that fixes battery on the 14 to see the true battery difference.

Love the panning shot

We have finally hit the flat line in Technology advancement in phones for a while I think.

Funny how last year we said the A15 was on the same process as the a14 (even though it added billions of transistors and was honestly a pretty decent upgrade in terms of performance AND performance per watt), but this year we say it’s on a new process even though “4nm” is just the 3rd generation, or the second upgrade to their 5 nm process.

I play Apex Legends Mobile and I’ve noticed a huge thermal performance improvement on the A16 vs A15. I used to get screen dimming after 10 min on High settings. Now I can max it out on Ultra HD at 60 FPS and no thermal issues at all for 20 min+.

How do you know that the A16's GPU cores didn't throttle during the Wildlife benchmark?

Great comparison! Thank you.

Is action mode available on the front camera? My biggest question.. as no one has mentioned it yet.

4nm is 3rd generation 5nm. I think they used 4nm as a marketing trick to counter Samsung who also claimed 4nm. Well Samsung's 4nm cannot perform as good as even TSMC's 7nm processes but I guess marketing is more important than truth nowadays

This is just one reason I just ordered an iPhone 11 Pro used/refurbished. Add the hilariously big camera bump, USB-C and I'll wait for the 15 for my next new iPhone. The 11 Pro I ordered with a massive 512 of storage and it was about 1/3rd the cost of the equivalent 14 Pro.

Personally I'm more excited about what next year's iPhone brings to the table 😀

I've yet to see anyone review if there is also a 128GB vs 256GB storage speed difference like there was on the MacBook Air M2. The iPhone 13 Pro had different camera features based upon the amount of storage the phone had.

Comparing against a 3 year old device makes sense if you think about who is the biggest group of upgraders - people with 3 year old phones or older.

I got the 14 Pro Max and it feels noticeably snappier vs my previous 13 Pro Max which surprised me because the 13 Pro is no slouch. The multi-core difference is higher than single core and perhaps that's what helps in this case.

Friend and I were just discussing how this didn’t feel like much of an upgrade. I went right to your channel to figure out why.

I'm no expert, but is using percent change the best way to compare generations of chips? For example, what's better, getting a 20% pay raise when you're making $10,000/year or getting a 10% pay raise when you're making $100,000/year? Clearly the smaller percent pay raise actually represents a much better pay raise.

Amazing review 👍🏾

Imo phone manufacturers should finally acknowledge, that benchmarks of flagship cpus are not relevant anymore in 2022 - I don't care about the fact, that phone got 5000 pts in Geekbench if it isn't able to maintain stable 120 fps (and sometimes even 60) in most games for more than 10 mins.

waiting on a 3nm macbook pro and iphone hopefully the full screen this time.

Hey Luke, I just switched over to ALL apple products this year having had to buy a couple of home pod mini’s to have them mounted in my bedroom to the walls, they are so good at allowing me to go to sleep it’s not even funny.

Temperature?

You can not compare cores without looking at the clock speeds! If they are clocked 10% higher and computes 10% faster, than the core itself is not faster per clock cycle. It may be a bit more energy efficient so it can run faster without drawing more power or getting hotter though.

very interesting. I was super excited to see A16 based on 4nm, but not seeing many gains in both performance and battery is concerning. Gotta think M2 pro will have 300g/sec ram, the faster internet speeds, faster SSD.. and perhaps 15% improved performance with 15% improved battery life? Is it worth it or maybe make more sense to get the M1 pro with 1TB SSD and unbinned chip for $400 off at best buy?

The comparative better perf of the M2 gpu cores will be doing to memory bandwidth and on die cache.

4nm isn’t a full process node. Its more of branding and optimising the 5 nm process ( which itself wasn’t a huge jump from 7nm). 3nm process node will be a full process node jump from 7nm. So there is not a lot of performance gains. It will mostly save more power than performance.

Will we ever have an iphone with USB C type connection and not Lightning? I refuse to buy one until they do.

Recently just raised the prices of battery replacements. Different approach to planned obsolescence maybe?

I notice a much weaker battery with my 14 pro max compared to my 13 pro max at 98% battery health. I wonder if it’s the chip over working and not being optimized

Luke said the SC performance is about 14% faster. He's wrong. It's actually only 8.4% faster. Maybe he was thinking of the other scores: MC is 13.2% faster, CP is 14.6%. A lot of the performance gain is due to a faster clock speed: 3.44 GHz vs 3.23 GHz, a 6.5% increase. And going from 5 nm to 4 nm has also helped, since smaller transistors have faster switching times. Finally, Apple says the A16 efficiency cores have better performance, which further helps MC scores. We now apparently live in a post-Moore's Law world, so don't expect processor performance to increase dramatically each year like it used to. Improvements in the future may be logarithmic instead of exponential.

Do like I did: went from A12 to A15.. amazing difference. Performance comes in little baby steps..

I think it makes perfect sense that Apple choose to compare the A16 to the A13. I suspect they picked a chip that beats the competitor's current 2022 CPUs (as seen in thier graph) and it is the one that most people who are going to upgrade would be coming from. I think they realize that most people are keeping their phone for around 3 years, meaning those people would be coming from the A13-ish generation of CPU. I know all of the youtube reviewers want to know how it compares to last year, but that isn't what most of the public needs to know.

it's 4 years ahead of snapdragon. it's good enough even if they kept the A16 2 more years

I’m disappointed they haven’t moved to a new version of Arm yet! It’ll come with a performance boost also.

"KZfaqr falls for foundry process node marketing" 🤣

It seems from tests that while the chip runs not that much faster, as the A15 was already a beast, it seems to run cooler for longer. Basically better for extreme gamers on their iPhones.

Another reason to slow down a mobile chip is to save a battery. Something Apple knows all too well.

Thanks Luke!

The cost of iPhone in Morocco is the price of two iphone 14 pro. Apple open a store over here please

Everyone keeps talking about faster and faster CPU, but what is the point when your phone doesn't have proper cooling. No matter how efficient you make the cores, eventually you will hit a ceiling for performance without proper cooling. Heck even using the phone while it is charging makes it super hot. Also more and more powerful CPU drain the battery quicker. Honestly the majority of people just use their phones for web browsing, instagram, ETC. Why on earth do you need all this performance?

It's not really a surprise that A16 uses the same CPU cores and GPU cores as the A15, and it was no surprise that the A15 used (almost) the same P-cores on the CPU side as the A14 either. N4 is actually technically a frequency regression compared to N5P (~2% slower), but thanks to Apple's tight collab with TSMC and other architectural optimizations, they were still able to increase the frequency and not downclock the A16 compared to A15. In short, A16 uses the "same" CPU cores as A15, M1, or A14 (though, if A16's P-cores can clock 7% higher at 20% lower power, you can't really call them the "same" cores, even if the perf. increase is small or if the transistor layout is very similar, just like how you (and Apple's engineers with their codenames) couldn't call the A15's P-cores the same as A14) (and again, "the same cores but clocked a little higher" doesn't cut it either because, again, it clocks higher (or is clocked higher), and uses less power or less energy to complete the same task). And A16 has the "same" GPU cores as A15, and (partially) M1 (and the GPU cores seem to have been improved the *least*, so calling them "the same" is maybe the most suitable for the GPUs). While we point out that the M1 is derived from A14 whenever we talk about it, its GPU cores were quite different in that it had 2x higher FP32 throughput than the A14's GPU cores. A15 adopted this new architecture a year later and put more features on top, like sparse depth/stencil map and lossy texture compression. But A16 doesn't seem to have changed much in terms of new GPU features, so we can call A16 and A15 "the same" in this regard. The biggest factor that will improve the *multicore CPU* and GPU performance this year will be the fact that A16 switches to LPDDR5 memory from LPDDR4X. And the reason it will improve multithreaded CPU perf. more than singlethreaded perf. is because as all of those cores are working hard there will be a bigger strain on the memory bus, think of it like how a wider highway wouldn't help an individual car go much faster, but if there are other cars on the road individual cores will face much less congestion. And of course higher memory bandwidth will help the GPU the most as graphics is way more parallelized than CPU work.

Now the 95% of people doesn't need more performance, we need more autonomy and power efficient, so I prefer get 4 years in 4 nm but each generation better in efficiency than previous. (At least 10% better each year)

Honestly even an iPhone X is so fast today that you can’t feel a difference as a normal user which 99.9% of us are.

Don't cases trap heat inside?

TSMC 4nm is just minor improvement to 5nm, it’s the same node. Next big jump is 3nm for iPhone next year.

What video ratio is this?

Did you mention the clock speed of the A16 compared to the M2 CPU?

You have 14 pro and 14 pro max. Why didn't you test the 14 pro as well? Max Tech found that the 14 pro is actually slower in terms of geek bench multicore compared to 14 Pro max because it is smaller and cannot cool as well as the pro max

Following the updates the , the a16 bionic has not been fine tuned yet, give it a few months with the updates once it’s tuned a little we will the battery and performance improvement, and what the a16 can handle

Seems like the same chip. Just upped the clock speed a little to take advantage of 4nm.

Luke, Question for you and your followers? Does any of your followers had an issue with the screen doing a squeaking sound when you press near the dynamic Island, even when the phone is turned off?

Where’s the 14% improvement coming from on single core performance? Based on those numbers, that’s only an 8% improvement.

This is why I don’t upgrade the iPhone every year, I upgrade every four years! 😁

So I guess you decided to go with the pro vs the pro max ?

How are you getting 14% faster on single core? 1874 / 1728 = 1.084 more like 8.5% faster... Multi-core however is about 13-14% faster...

Listen they have topped the performance , they just don’t see the pint in making it any faster because it’s already was ahead of it’s time so just make it more efficient simple

*Better tell me if iPhone 14s have Noise Cancelling in Phone Calls as in 13s Apple disabled this feature*

I believe the A16 chip is mHz lowered to use less energy I.e. battery life rather than waste it on questionable speed boost advantage. This helps keep battery weight/size down while still improving or sustaining current norms. M2 chips will not be so constrained for energy saving and will likely see higher mHz speeds for purposeful gains. I think this should be more obvious than your speculated concerns.

Hey Luke did you know the iPhone 14s A15 has the same amount of cores as the A16? It has 1 GPU core more than the iPhone 13 A15 chip (as per Apple Store app). Is there a test for this?

The next iPhone will just be a dynamic island. Code name Cyclops.

I think the next major leap forward will be the A17 Soc, which will be built on TSMC's new 3 nm process that they have been working on for 3-4 years. I wouldn't be surprised that the 2023 iPhones will have two versions of A17: iPhone 17 and 17 Plus: 4 high-performance CPU cores, four high-efficiency CPU cores, 5 GPU cores, and 6 GB of RAM. iPhone 17 Pro models: 4 high-performance CPU cores, four high-efficiency CPU cores, 6 GPU cores, and 8 GB of RAM. The A17 will integrate with either Qualcomm's X70 radio modem chip for better 5G connectivity and a new (maybe!) Broadcom chip for full WiFi 6E (802.11ax extended) support.

I have had Torras case for over a year and it’s fucking solid as F! Had to get a new one find my iPhone 14 pro max and it’s fantastic!

Luke, differences in processors is not simply cpu and gpu, how about the much improved display engine, isp , faster neural engine , more memory bandwidth….. this isn’t a huge update at all but this comparison ignores everything they actually marketed the new chip to do. It wasn’t about making it 25% to satisfy tech KZfaq , it was about making a better iPhone processor to enable new functionality. According to Kuo, M3 will be based off of 3nm as will the A17. I’d put my money on that being where the real cpu/ gpu improvements come into play.

In Mrwhosetheboss battery test the 13PM lasted 19 minutes more than the 14PM. The 14 has 29MAH smaller battery. But it’s high performance core is 20% more power efficient than the A15 the new 5G chip (X65) is also more power efficient.