Apple A14


The Apple A14 Bionic is a 64-bit ARMv8.4-A system on a chip designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series. It appears in the iPad Air and iPad, as well as iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max. Apple states that the central processing unit performs up to 40% faster than the A12, while the graphics processing unit is up to 30% faster than the Apple A12. It also includes a 16-core neural engine and new machine learning matrix accelerators that perform twice and ten times as fast, respectively.

Design

The Apple A14 Bionic features an Apple-designed 64-bit, six-core CPU, implementing ARMv8 with two high-performance cores called Firestorm and four energy-efficient cores called Icestorm.
The Apple A14 integrates an Apple-designed four-core GPU with 30% faster graphics performance than the A12. The A14 includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a new 16-core Neural Engine. The Neural Engine can perform 11 trillion operations per second. In addition to the separate Neural Engine, the A14 CPU includes second-generation machine learning matrix scalar multiplication accelerators. The A14 also includes a new image processor with improved computational photography capabilities.
A14 is manufactured by TSMC on their first-generation 5 nm fabrication process, N5. This makes the A14 the first commercially available product to be manufactured on a 5 nm process node. The transistor count has increased to 11.8 billion, a 38.8% increase from the A13's transistor count of 8.5 billion. According to Semianalysis, the die size of A14 processor is 88 mm2, with a transistor density of 134 million transistors per mm2. It is manufactured in a package on package together with 4 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone 12 and 6 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone 12 Pro.
The A14 has video codec encoding support for HEVC and H.264. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, and Motion JPEG.
The Apple A14 would be later used as the basis for the M1 series of chips, used in various Macintosh and iPad models.

Products that include the Apple A14 Bionic

  • iPad
  • iPad Air
  • iPhone 12 & 12 Mini
  • iPhone 12 Pro & 12 Pro Max

    Variants

The table below shows the various SoCs based on the "Firestorm" and "Icestorm" microarchitectures.
VariantCPU
cores 		GPU
cores		GPU
EU		Graphics
ALU		Neural Engine coresNeural Engine performanceMemory Transistor
count
A146 4645121611 TOPS4–611.8 billion
M18 71128961611 TOPS8–1616 billion
M18 812810241611 TOPS8–1616 billion
M1 Pro8 1422417921611 TOPS16–3234 billion
M1 Pro10 1422417921611 TOPS16–3234 billion
M1 Pro10 1625620481611 TOPS16–3234 billion
M1 Max10 2438430721611 TOPS32–6457 billion
M1 Max10 3251240961611 TOPS32–6457 billion
M1 Ultra20 4876861443222 TOPS64–128114 billion
M1 Ultra20 64102481923222 TOPS64–128114 billion