‘A14 Bionic’ Visits GeekBench and Flexes Some Serious Muscle

• The ‘A14 Bionic’ is a beast, especially to what concerns graphics performance and gaming.
• The new chip was benchmarked on GeekBench, and it performs way better than the previous generation.
• Apple will now dive deeper into the gaming space, possibly preparing an Apple TV with the A14.

One of the most exciting stuff we saw during the Apple “Time Flies” event last month was the introduction of the ‘A14 Bionic’ chip on the new iPad Air. This processor is the first 5-nanometer process chip used by Apple, so it’s ushering a new era of performance and, at the same time, giving us a taste of what’s to come with Apple’s Silicon processors.

Compared to the A13 Bionic, which is built on the second-gen 7-nanometer process, the A14 also features 3.2 billion more transistors, a new 16-core neural engine that can perform 11 trillion operations per second (whereas the previous chip was limited to 1 trillion operations), a new AI unit, and significantly improved graphics processing capabilities. Finally, the clocking on the A14 is 300MHz higher than A13, while the core count remains the same at six.

These are all numbers, and numbers mean little until chips hit real-life benchmarks. This is what happened with a new iPad Air visiting GeekBench and coming out the other end with an impressive performance.

The “Metal Score” bench test results leave the A13Z of the 2020 iPad Pro 8% behind, the A12X of the 2018 iPad Pro 16% behind, the A13 of the iPhone 11 being 72% slower, and the baseline A12 beating inside the iPad Air 3 “crawling” with a figure that is about 140% lower.

“Metal Score” is focused on GPU performance, which comes at the most dramatic difference compared to previous generations. On the CPU single-core performance, the A14 is around 18% higher than the A13, and that should also be more than enough to leave the upcoming Snapdragon 875 and Exynos 1000 behind. On the multi-core performance, the A14 leaves the previous generation roughly 28% behind.

So, both tests clearly showcase that the A14 is going to be a leap forward even compared to the A13, and a reason alone to upgrade to the upcoming iPhone 12 lineup. Of course, for people who just browse the web and don’t perform productive or pro-grade tasks on their devices, even the A12 is adequate - so it all depends on what satisfies your need or scratches your itch.

However you choose to see this, the A14 is a beast, and rumors claim that Apple is already working on a new Apple TV with the A14 and 6GB of RAM, that will be heavily focused around gaming. With such GPU power, this is only natural, and some could say Apple was even late to join that game.