Apple A16 Bionic vs Apple A15 Bionic: Are Newer Better?

With the announcement of the new iPhone 14 series of phones came the latest Apple Silicon mobile chip in the form of the A16. But how does it compare to its predecessor?

Apple announced many new devices at its Far Out event, surprising everyone with the new rugged and durable Apple Watch Ultra along with the Apple Watch Series 8, with the latest pair of AirPods Pro 2 featuring Apple Spatial Audio.

But the new range of phones is what really stole the show, with Apple unveiling four new models including the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

And it looks like the Pro and Pro Max models will feature Apple Silicon’s latest mobile chip, the A16 Bionic, while the Vanilla and Plus models of the phone will stick with last year’s A15 Bionic chip.

Here are some of the main differences between the A16 Bionic chip and the A15 Bionic chip.

More transistors than before

The A16 Bionic will contain 16 billion transistors, a full billion more than can be found in the A15.

This suggests that the iPhone 14 Pro models should be much faster in terms of data processing, as more work can be done in less time thanks to the extra transistors. In theory, it should be more powerful than its predecessor, making the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max more efficient overall.

50% more memory bandwidth

While the A15 and A16 share the same five-core GPU, the A16 has improved on its predecessor by improving GPU memory bandwidth by 50%. This should provide a better experience while playing mobile games, as the GPU will be better equipped to handle heavy workloads.

The higher memory bandwidth means that watching videos or playing games on the iPhone 14 Pro should be much smoother and faster compared to the vanilla iPhone 14.

Improved camera performance

Apple has created a new image signal processing processor (ISP) that should be able to create more detailed images than any other iPhone on the market. Within the A16 Bionic GPU chip, the processor, neural engine and ISP work together to power the four-pixel sensor.

According to the company, the latest Apple Silicon chip can perform up to four trillion operations per photo. This works alongside the new Photonic Engine, which allows Deep Fusion to happen earlier in the process on uncompressed images, which should preserve more data and allow for brighter, more vibrant photos.

This wasn’t present on the A15 Bionic chip and should provide better quality photos, although we’ll certainly try it out when we get the review devices available.

Faster processor

Apple claims the A16’s 6-core processor is faster than its predecessor, although it hasn’t given any definitive statistics yet.

The A16 and A15 share the same setup, featuring four efficient cores and two performance cores, along with a five-core GPU and a 16-core Neural engine. While we can’t speculate how much faster this processor is compared to its predecessor, the increased transistor count will make the processor run faster overall, which should provide smoother performance compared to the A15.