# A16 Bionic



## Andropov

A dedicated thread to talk about Apple's latest chip 

Seems like this leaked Geekbench result (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/17141095) is more in line with expectations: 1887 in single core, 5455 in multicore (+9.2%, +13.4%). Interestingly, the biggest improvement in multicore is in AES-XTS, which has jumped quite a bit (+36%), despite not improving as much in single core (+8.7%). Could this be that the new E cores are significantly better now at this particular subtest? Or maybe a result of the increased memory bandwidth?

No Geekbench compute results yet, sadly.


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## exoticspice1

I expect the GPU be a 4-5% improvement due to LPDRR5 and also because the GPU is largely untouched from A15 other Apple would have said in their marketing.


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## Andropov

exoticspice1 said:


> I expect the GPU be a 4-5% improvement due to LPDRR5 and also because the GPU is largely untouched from A15 other Apple would have said in their marketing.



Hard to know, it'll depend on the workload. I took a frame capture of Apple's _Modern Rendering With Metal_ sample code, which is the closest thing I have at hand that resembles the 'typical' game engine, to see how much of a limitation memory bandwidth (which has improved by 50%) is during a typical frame. Xcode GPU profiling tools in frame capture show main memory limiter at ~29% on average during a frame on an iPhone 13 Pro. Hence I'd expect that the same frame on a A16 Bionic with +50% memory bandwidth to be around (gross estimate) ~9% faster due to memory bandwidth improvements alone. 

And while _Modern Rendering With Metal_ sample code may look like a traditional game engine, it's highly optimized towards TBDR which comes with lower memory bandwidth usage compared to less optimized renderers, so 3rd party games may saturate the memory bandwidth more often and therefore benefit even more from the increased bandwidth.

Even then, that's assuming that Apple didn't change the GPU cores *at all* this year, which still seems unlikely to me. Unprecedented, even. But I'll give that it's odd that Apple didn't mention anything about the GPU at the keynote.


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## Cmaier

Andropov said:


> A dedicated thread to talk about Apple's latest chip
> 
> Seems like this leaked Geekbench result (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/17141095) is more in line with expectations: 1887 in single core, 5455 in multicore (+9.2%, +13.4%). Interestingly, the biggest improvement in multicore is in AES-XTS, which has jumped quite a bit (+36%), despite not improving as much in single core (+8.7%). Could this be that the new E cores are significantly better now at this particular subtest? Or maybe a result of the increased memory bandwidth?
> 
> No Geekbench compute results yet, sadly.




Hard for me to figure out why AES-XTS would have such a jump in MP vs. SP, given the description of the test here: https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf.    Shouldn’t be a lot of dependency on memory bandwidth.  I think your first guess may be right - the E cores got better at it.


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## Andropov

Cmaier said:


> I think your first guess may be right - the E cores got better at it.



Hmm. If that's the case, E cores must be an order of magnitude faster at it now. I was trying to infer how much of the A15 Bionic multicore AEX-XTS score was due to the E cores by substracting 2 * the single score result from the total multicore score. But it seems like going from 1P to the full 2P + 4E cores doesn't even double performance on the A15: it goes from 4.82GB/s to 8.28GB/s, ~1.71x the single core result. Not a great scaling. So we can't tell how much of that (if any) is due to the E cores.

On the other hand, the A16 Bionic goes from 5.24GB/s on 1P core to 14.2GB/s on 2P + 4E cores, ~2.71x the single core result. So the E cores must now account for at least 3.72GB/s of the multicore result, potentially more (since we know the scaling wasn't 2x on the A15), up to ~5GB/s. Quite impressive if true, given how little A15's E cores contributed to the AES-XTS multicore score.


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## Cmaier

AnTuTu iPhone 14 Pro benchmarks show dramatic performance improvements
					

AnTuTu iPhone 14 Pro benchmarks show dramatic performance improvements in tests designed to mimic real-life usage of the devices. The improvements found are markedly better than expected following earlier benchmarks run in Geekbench 5 … Background This year, only the two Pro model iPhones get...




					9to5mac.com


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## Andropov

Whoa, +28% on GPU. New GPU core design confirmed? Seems too high to be just from increased memory bandwidth and better process node.

+17% multicore CPU score would already be great on its own, but Apple claims to have '20% lower power' on top of that. Did they mean 20% less power at same performance level or something like that? +17% performance at 80% the power sounds too good to be true.


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## Cmaier

Andropov said:


> Whoa, +28% on GPU. New GPU core design confirmed? Seems too high to be just from increased memory bandwidth and better process node.
> 
> +17% multicore CPU score would already be great on its own, but Apple claims to have '20% lower power' on top of that. Did they mean 20% less power at same performance level or something like that? +17% performance at 80% the power sounds too good to be true.




Lots of good questions. It does seem that Apple has stopped trying to talk up its performance improvements and is letting customers get surprised (in a good way) by what they find over the last couple of iterations on the A-series side.  

As for the 20%, I think they did NOT mean ”at the same performance,” because in the same sentence they talked about something else as being ”x% less power at the same performance” - I can’t remember what they were talking about.


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## Joelist

Is Geekbench the one that needs to be patched? Remember one of the big benchmarks was WAY off on Apple Silicon performance.


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## Cmaier

Nope



Joelist said:


> Is Geekbench the one that needs to be patched? Remember one of the big benchmarks was WAY off on Apple Silicon performance.


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## Colstan

Andropov said:


> Whoa, +28% on GPU. New GPU core design confirmed?



Obviously, we're many steps from an A16 architectural foundation to becoming an M-series product release, but I'm hoping this is true, because GPU performance seems to be the one area where Apple Silicon Macs still fall short compared to PCs. I'm sure we all remember this infamous graph:





I think it's still unclear exactly what Apple was attempting to communicate. I had assumed that they were trying to say that the M1 Ultra performs about the same as an RXT 3090 if both are using the same wattage, but they communicated it in the most ham-fisted way possible. It gave off the impression that the Ultra had nearly identical performance to the 3090, which was immediately proven untrue once the Mac Studio was independently benchmarked.

It's a shame, because the M1 Ultra is an otherwise extremely impressive SoC, yet Apple needlessly gave it a self-inflicted black eye. According to Geekbench, the top-end M1 Ultra with a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 128GB of unified memory blows away the competition in regards to single-core, multi-core, and tasks that take advantage of specialized co-processors on the SoC.

Here are the CPU scores for the 28-core Intel Xeon W-3275M inside the top-end 2019 Mac Pro:





Here are the results for the M1 Ultra inside the high-end Mac Studio:





That's remarkable, and keep in mind that the 28-core Mac Pro starts at $13,000 while a similar Mac Studio is about $6,200.

However, this same configuration Mac Studio, specifically upgraded to the 64-core GPU, falls short on Geekbench's GPU tasks compared to similar PCs, which detracts from otherwise stellar performance from high-end Apple Silicon:





The M1 Ultra is no slouch, that's impressive considering that this is Apple's first desktop GPU, but they shouldn't be claiming any sort of parity with Nvidia's top-performing part. The M1 Ultra destroyed the Mac Pro in CPU, but it barely bested the 6600 XT, which just so happens to be the MPX module I recently ordered for my Mac Pro.

I'm hoping that @Andropov is right and that Apple has refocused considerably on Apple Silicon's GPU performance, the area that seems to need the most work, and that @Cmaier is also correct that Apple is going to let the chips do the talking, rather than vague, occasionally bizarre charts spawn from Apple's marketing department.

Regardless, if GPU improvements prove correct with the A16, this portends well for all Apple Silicon products moving forward.


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## Cmaier

Colstan said:


> Obviously, we're many steps from an A16 architectural foundation to becoming an M-series product release, but I'm hoping this is true, because GPU performance seems to be the one area where Apple Silicon Macs still fall short compared to PCs. I'm sure we all remember this infamous graph:
> 
> View attachment 17630
> 
> I think it's still unclear exactly what Apple was attempting to communicate. I had assumed that they were trying to say that the M1 Ultra performs about the same as an RXT 3090 if both are using the same wattage, but they communicated it in the most ham-fisted way possible. It gave off the impression that the Ultra had nearly identical performance to the 3090, which was immediately proven untrue once the Mac Studio was independently benchmarked.
> 
> It's a shame, because the M1 Ultra is an otherwise extremely impressive SoC, yet Apple needlessly gave it a self-inflicted black eye. According to Geekbench, the top-end M1 Ultra with a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 128GB of unified memory blows away the competition in regards to single-core, multi-core, and tasks that take advantage of specialized co-processors on the SoC.
> 
> Here are the CPU scores for the 28-core Intel Xeon W-3275M inside the top-end 2019 Mac Pro:
> 
> View attachment 17636
> 
> Here are the results for the M1 Ultra inside the high-end Mac Studio:
> 
> View attachment 17637
> 
> That's remarkable, and keep in mind that the 28-core Mac Pro starts at $13,000 while a similar Mac Studio is about $6,200.
> 
> However, this same configuration Mac Studio, specifically upgraded to the 64-core GPU, falls short on Geekbench's GPU tasks compared to similar PCs, which detracts from otherwise stellar performance from high-end Apple Silicon:
> 
> View attachment 17635
> 
> The M1 Ultra is no slouch, that's impressive considering that this is Apple's first desktop GPU, but they shouldn't be claiming any sort of parity with Nvidia's top-performing part. The M1 Ultra destroyed the Mac Pro in CPU, but it barely bested the 6600 XT, which just so happens to be the MPX module I recently ordered for my Mac Pro.
> 
> I'm hoping that @Andropov is right and that Apple has refocused considerably on Apple Silicon's GPU performance, the area that seems to need the most work, and that @Cmaier is also correct that Apple is going to let the chips do the talking, rather than vague, occasionally bizarre charts spawn from Apple's marketing department.
> 
> Regardless, if GPU improvements prove correct with the A16, this portends well for all Apple Silicon products moving forward.




I think Apple is going to have to have a decent answer for at least GPU compute for the “extreme” chip for Mac Pro.  They also need astounding performance/watt for what they hope to do with glasses.  They have to be working very hard on the GPU side.


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## Yoused

Colstan said:


> ere are the CPU scores for the 28-core Intel Xeon W-3275M inside the top-end 2019 Mac Pro:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Here are the results for the M1 Ultra inside the high-end Mac Studio:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> That's remarkable, and keep in mind that the 28-core Mac Pro starts at $13,000 while a similar Mac Studio is about $6,200.



But remember, the 28-core Xeon in Mac Pro had a base clock of 2.5GHz (if you are running more than about a third of the cores, count on base clock) while the Ultra runs at 3.23.  2.5 x 28 (or 1.1 x 56, being generous) should still be better than 3.23 x 16 (though, add in 4 x 2.0, that may make the difference).


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## Cmaier

So M3 uses N3E and some iPad uses N3? But recent reports have all the M2 variants using N5P.  So confusing trying to guess what Apple is up to. 









						M3 Chip for Macs and A17 Chip for iPhone 15 Pro Will Reportedly Use TSMC's Second-Generation 3nm Process
					

Apple's future M3 chip for Macs and A17 chip for iPhone 15 Pro models will be manufactured based on TSMC's enhanced 3nm process known as N3E...




					www.macrumors.com


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## Colstan

Yoused said:


> But remember, the 28-core Xeon in Mac Pro had a base clock of 2.5GHz (if you are running more than about a third of the cores, count on base clock)



I can't speak to the M1 Ultra, but I've been running some stress tests on my Mac Pro with a Xeon W-3245. While this is all preliminary, I started out with the Intel Power Gadget utility. First off, as far as I can tell, Turbo Boost 3.0 isn't enabled on the Mac Pro, because I was never able to push it to 4.6Ghz, just the normal max boost of 4.4Ghz. The only way I was able to sustain 4.4Ghz was with a single thread at 100%, bump that up to two threads and it drops to 4.2Ghz. Increase it to 4 threads and it goes down again to 4.1Ghz.

Here's where it gets weird. This Xeon is 16C/32T, when maxing out 100% with 32 threads, all cores run at 3.9Ghz. It isn't until I enable AVX that it starts taking a major toll on the CPU. With AVX-256, it drops down to 3.6Ghz. Finally, when running AVX-512, it sits at the rated 3.2Ghz.

As I said, this is just my first test, and my initial assumption is that something seems off. However, coming from a Core i3, I'm hardly in a position to be certain of that, and I've been using Intel's own stress test. Temps never get above 70C, while the Tcase is 77C, so there's a bit of thermal headroom. My intitial conclusion is that Intel's boost clocks are fairy tales composed of unicorn tears, smoke powder, and liquid joy. However, at least with the Mac Pro, which is very much a quality thermal solution, Xeons are able to stay well above their rated speeds for sustained workloads, as long as you keep them away from AVX-512, which is used by very few users or applications. Unless you are emulating a Playstation 3, which apparently gets a 30% boost from AVX-512, not that I plan on doing that.

Even with 32-threads at 100%, the fans stay reasonably silent, only ramping somewhat, but not annoyingly so. Putting my hand behind the case, I feel a substantial increase in heat output, so Intel Power Gadget is definitely working it hard. It does make me wonder how much effort Apple is going to put into cooling the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. I think it's more likely that the SoC itself is going to be the limiting factor, rather than thermal constraints, unless they decide to follow Intel and AMD into power consumption crazy town. Even though I'm certainly not in the market for one, I'm very much looking forward to what form the next Mac Pro takes, because it's perhaps going to be the most exotic Apple Silicon Mac, and therefore the most interesting.


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## DT

Cmaier said:


> So confusing trying to guess what Apple is up to.


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## Andropov

Colstan said:


> Obviously, we're many steps from an A16 architectural foundation to becoming an M-series product release, but I'm hoping this is true, because GPU performance seems to be the one area where Apple Silicon Macs still fall short compared to PCs. I'm sure we all remember this infamous graph:
> 
> I think it's still unclear exactly what Apple was attempting to communicate. I had assumed that they were trying to say that the M1 Ultra performs about the same as an RXT 3090 if both are using the same wattage, but they communicated it in the most ham-fisted way possible. It gave off the impression that the Ultra had nearly identical performance to the 3090, which was immediately proven untrue once the Mac Studio was independently benchmarked.



At the same wattage, the M1 Ultra is much faster than the 3090. The lowest power consumption of the 3090 is higher than the highest power consumption of the M1 Ultra. I believe the graph must be reflecting some kind of internal test where the M1 Ultra is rasterising the same scene as the 3090. TBDR GPUs excel at rasterization if the graphics pipeline is designed with TBDR in mind. Maybe the problem is that no one is doing that kind of optimizations (yet?). I doubt they made the graph out of thin air.

In any case, the best thing for Apple to do is what they're already doing: helping out in open source applications (like Blender) so they can have a properly designed backend that takes advantage of their GPUs.



Colstan said:


> I'm hoping that @Andropov is right and that Apple has refocused considerably on Apple Silicon's GPU performance, the area that seems to need the most work, and that @Cmaier is also correct that Apple is going to let the chips do the talking, rather than vague, occasionally bizarre charts spawn from Apple's marketing department.



They probably didn't want to hype the A16 Bionic performance too much on this year's keynote, since the iPhone 14 is not getting it. I'm sure they'll go back to roasting the competition when they release the M2 Pro/Max or the M3.


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## Jimmyjames

The M1 Ultra gets 260fps in gfxbench 4k Aztec Ruins.








						GFXBench - Unified cross-platform 3D graphics benchmark database
					

The first unified cross-platform 3D graphics benchmark database for comparing Android, iOS, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT capable devices based on graphics processing power.




					gfxbench.com
				




The Nvidia 3090 gets 235fps in the same test.








						GFXBench - Unified cross-platform 3D graphics benchmark database
					

The first unified cross-platform 3D graphics benchmark database for comparing Android, iOS, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT capable devices based on graphics processing power.




					gfxbench.com
				




It does seem like in pure raster performance the Ultra is as fast or faster than the 3090, not sure why the reviews say different (although having read some lately they mostly lack competence). The Ultra does fall behind in pure compute perf though. Apple should have been clearer, but they weren't misleading.


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## Joelist

I found it - it is Geekbench and specifically that GB Compute is too short bursty - it doesn't let AS ramp up all the way before quitting. It's why other benches and real world scenarios show better performance. It is referenced in Anandtech ( Andrei Frumusanu specifically).


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## Cmaier

Joelist said:


> I found it - it is Geekbench and specifically that GB Compute is too short bursty - it doesn't let AS ramp up all the way before quitting. It's why other benches and real world scenarios show better performance. It is referenced in Anandtech ( Andrei Frumusanu specifically).



Ah, thought you were referring to the CPU tests in GB, not the GPU.


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## exoticspice1

Very little GPU improvement in A16. No wonder Apple did say anything new about the GPU.


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## Jimmyjames

exoticspice1 said:


> View attachment 17649
> Very little GPU improvement in A16. No wonder Apple did say anything new about the GPU.











						A16 Bionic
					

A dedicated thread to talk about Apple's latest chip :)  Seems like this leaked Geekbench result (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/17141095) is more in line with expectations: 1887 in single core, 5455 in multicore (+9.2%, +13.4%). Interestingly, the biggest improvement in multicore is in...




					talkedabout.com
				




This has just been discussed. GB has issues with ramping up too slowly on ASi. Antutu shows a much healthier improvement. I have no idea how reliable or reputable Antutu is however!


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## exoticspice1

Jimmyjames said:


> A16 Bionic
> 
> 
> A dedicated thread to talk about Apple's latest chip :)  Seems like this leaked Geekbench result (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/17141095) is more in line with expectations: 1887 in single core, 5455 in multicore (+9.2%, +13.4%). Interestingly, the biggest improvement in multicore is in...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> talkedabout.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This has just been discussed. GB has issues with ramping up too slowly on ASi. Antutu shows a much healthier improvement. I have no idea how reliable or reputable Antutu is however!



That only applies to Mx Max and Ultra chipsets.

Geekbench is fine to use for the A series and Mx base series. Previous A series chips in the GPU test have shown huge improvements. For example the A14 iPhone 12 Pro scored  around 9300 and A15 on iPhone 13 Pro scored around 14500. So ultra mobile chipsets Geekbench is fine to use.


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## Andropov

Andropov said:


> Hence I'd expect that the same frame on a A16 Bionic with +50% memory bandwidth to be around (gross estimate) ~9% faster due to memory bandwidth improvements alone.





exoticspice1 said:


> Very little GPU improvement in A16. No wonder Apple did say anything new about the GPU.



That's a 14509 -> 15807 = +8.9% in GPU performance... almost exactly what I estimated from bandwidth improvements alone. Hmm.


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## Jimmyjames

exoticspice1 said:


> That only applies to Mx Max and Ultra chipsets.
> 
> Geekbench is fine to use for the A series and Mx base series. Previous A series chips in the GPU test have shown huge improvements. For example the A14 iPhone 12 Pro scored  around 9300 and A15 on iPhone 13 Pro scored around 14500. So ultra mobile chipsets Geekbench is fine to use.



Hmmmm. We don’t really know that it does scale well on the A series. It’s true that previous generations showed a bigger leap, but the issue was ramping up regardless of chip size. It’s quite possible that it underestimates performance on all Apple Silicon chips, and that some modifications would yield hiher scores all round. Hence the better performance on other benchmarks like gfxbench and Antutu.


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## exoticspice1

Andropov said:


> That's a 14509 -> 15807 = +8.9% in GPU performance... almost exactly what I estimated from bandwidth improvements alone. Hmm.



Thats because the GPU is the same. I don't see M3 being based off A16 GPU and M2 already has LPDDR5. 

M2 GPU was based of A15 but M3 GPU maybe based of A17.


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## theorist9

Are single-precision (FP 32) TFLOPS a good meansure of general GPU compute performance?  If so, and based on this, I'd say get a Mac if your primary concern is GPU performance/watt, or go PC-NVIDIA if your primary concern is  GPU performance/$*:

[I don't fall into either category; for me,  the OS and my attendant user efficiency and experience are paramount, so I use a Mac.]

*TFLOPS, SINGLE-PRECISION (FP 32) *
M1: 2.6
M2: 3.6
M1 MAX: 10.4
M2 MAX: 14  (?) (EXTRAPOLATING FROM M2/M1 x M1 MAX)
4050: 14 (?) (entry-level, ~$250?)
M1 ULTRA: 21
M2 ULTRA: 29 (?) (EXTRAPOLATING FROM M2/M1 x M1 ULTRA)
3080: 30
4060: 31 (?) (entry-level, ~$330?)
3080 TI: 34
3090: 36
3090 TI: 40
4070: 43 (?) (mid-level, ~$550?)
4080: 49 (?)
M2 EXTREME: 58 (?) (EXTRAPOLATING FROM 2 x M2 ULTRA)
4090:  80 (?)
4090 TI: 89 (??)  (EXTRAPOLATING FROM 4090 x 3090 TI/3090)
M2 2X EXTREME: 116 (?)

*Of course there is also the energy cost. Don't know what the actual efficiencies are, but if a 500 W NVIDIA GPU is twice as fast as a 100 W AS GPU, and thus you'd need to run the 100 W GPU 5 hrs/day vs. 2.5 hours/day for the 500 W GPU, then the 500 W GPU would cost an extra $27/year for every 10 cents/kwh that your electricity costs (if both were run 365 days/year).


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## Colstan

Concerning Geekbench, it's almost like relying upon a single benchmark to determine an entire platform's capabilities is a fool's errand. I realize that it's the best we have right now to get an idea of A16's performance, but it's woefully inadequate in determining how much different it is in regard to its predecessor and competitors. It would be nice if we could run a two minute series of benchmarks and know everything there is to know about a device, but it doesn't work that way.

If you've been following the history of the industry for long enough, you'd know that individual benchmarks have issues, even going as far to cheat in order to favor one company over another, which has happened repeatedly in this business. I'm not accusing Geekbench of any shady shenanigans, they appear to produce the most accurate results that they can, but a single benchmark is never going to tell the whole story. It's difficult to find truly cross-platform, widely available results, but this needs to be viewed with caution until more data is available. Plus, we don't know exactly what features Apple has prioritized for the iPhone, and how this will impact the M-series going forward.



theorist9 said:


> [I don't fall into either category; for me,  the OS and my attendant user efficiency and experience are paramount, so I use a Mac.]



I completely agree with @theorist9. I pay attention to what the PC crowd are doing, because I am interested in technology. However, there's absolutely nothing that Microsoft, Intel, AMD, or Nvidia can release that's going to persuade me to switch from the Mac. In fact, with the way PCs are getting hotter, noisier, and guzzling more energy, they're heading in the opposite direction. It doesn't help that the operating system and ISA are covered with barnacles accumulated through decades of mismanagement, with the inability to cut out cruft and dead weight.

So, even if Apple doesn't always win the raw performance race every time, I'm okay with that. I'm not using a graphics card or CPU in isolation. I'm using a computer to accomplish real tasks. I appreciate that that Apple controls the entire stack, from the microcontrollers that drive the I/O ports, to the SoC, to the operating system and primary applications. It's the vertical integration strategy that Steve Jobs could have only dreamed of for the Mac. That's why I'm an Apple customer, not because it has the highest TFLOPS in a synthetic benchmark, but because I consider the user experience to be the absolute best.


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## mr_roboto

Geekbench isn't actually a single benchmark.  It's a self-contained suite of many benchmarks.  It generally appears to have been inspired by SPEC, and has been shown to correlate very well with SPEC.


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## Cmaier

mr_roboto said:


> Geekbench isn't actually a single benchmark.  It's a self-contained suite of many benchmarks.  It generally appears to have been inspired by SPEC, and has been shown to correlate very well with SPEC.



it’s a single benchmark in the sense that it collects the results of multiple workloads and produces a single score which is what most people look at.

even chip designers, who think in terms of SPEC, do not rely just on SPEC. You want a whole array of benchmarks from different sources with different philosophies, different workloads, different runtimes, etc.


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## tomO2013

I’m sitting on a bus with a 12 hour bus journey ahead of me. The person next to me has run out of juice twice and currently is using a large power bank to get juice to her Lenovo. I’m still working away on  my macbook!

It’s easy to get distracted with who has got the fastest, who has got the biggest numbers in an individual benchmark etc…
However day to day living with the product (for my needs) performance per watt trumps all else.
Perhaps it’s a little smug of me to say this, but I have a smile on my face that I know a secret that the lady next to me on the bus doesn’t. My macbook pro is unplugged, with juice to spare and still on it’s first charge while plowing through XCode tasks, multiple docker containers.
Any focus on efficiency and news of A16 is very exciting to me. Geekbench is interesting when you consider it from a traditional cpu vendor perspective. Apple however is NOT a traditional CPU vendor! They don’t sell CPU’s. They have no real interest beyond the peppering some bench’s as part of a wholistic product launch like a macbook. Intel, AMD on the other hand , cell CPU’s as the product.
You really have to question generic cross platform compiled benchmarks when viewed through the lens that  Apple silicon is sold as part of a product platform. It’s never intended to be used to run various versions of Windows, different flavours of Linux (Redhat, CentOS, Mint, Ubuntu, etc…). It’s designed to run on a controlled ecosystem -  either iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS. The co-processors and accelerators that apple includes on die, are designed for the most part to be accessed through Apples provided development tooling workflow and be as transparent as possible to the developer who uses their Core Frameworks etc…  Geekbench will never be able to show the benefits of this approach e.g. 8k smooth playback in FCP or DaVinci Resolve because to code such a benchmark would mean ignoring the co-processors that Apple provides and instead doing everything via generic CPU/GPU calls. Thats not to say Geekbench is useless, it’s more to say that it needs to be considered a datapoint and not representative of the platform performance holistically which I feel many youtube reviewers (and purveyors of random crab cake chess and hungry hungry hippo benchmarks over at the other place) tend to view it. 
In other words, in my humble opinion, Apple Silicon a design philosophy that is not intended to target cross platform generic code and instead is built around the philosophy of optimization where Apple controls the full widget.
The A-series are designed to be optimized for efficiency (perf/watt) and an optimized application workflow in the real world.
If we are not seeing much beyond 9% improvement in GPU with A16 , we can likely be reasonably sure that the GPU itself is sipping less power from a perf/watt perspective relative to A15. That’s great news!
As an aside, NVidias latest GPU 4090 is rumored to have a 660W TDP for the graphics card alone. An individual part.
Apple’s approach with TBDR is a smarter approach to GPU efficiency and performance (in a world that we live in that is more energy conscious)
Just my 0.02 from my perspective.
Hope y’all having a great day.


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## Cmaier

The thing with benchmarks is more or less the thing with standardized school testing.  You get what you test for.  If you test and quantize A, B, and C and publish a ranking based on that test, you end up getting everyone competing in that ranking. But to a particular user, D, E, and F may be what is important. 

At AMD we had thousands of “traces” that we looked at (for compatibility and performance testing).  You can’t optimize for everything, but you do want to have a very broad spectrum of things that you at least look at.  Some of the standard benchmarks back in the day went to things like processing a SPICE deck (a tool used by electrical engineers), which is a pretty specialized use case that had an outsized impact on how CPU vendors competed with each other back in the day, for example.


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## mr_roboto

Cmaier said:


> it’s a single benchmark in the sense that it collects the results of multiple workloads and produces a single score which is what most people look at.
> 
> even chip designers, who think in terms of SPEC, do not rely just on SPEC. You want a whole array of benchmarks from different sources with different philosophies, different workloads, different runtimes, etc.



Sure, was just saying that it's got a variety of loads under the hood.

And you're absolutely right that SPEC isn't enough - from a 1990s UNIX workstation perspective, SPEC is reasonably broad, but from a general purpose desktop OS perspective it's not.  If nothing else, most of SPEC is C and a little bit of Fortran, and we're in the middle of a slow shift away from C-family languages.  (Which is a somewhat faster shift on Apple's own platform, given how much they're pushing Swift.)


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## Yoused

theorist9 said:


> Are single-precision (FP 32) TFLOPS a good meansure of general GPU compute performance?




Kind of not a simple question. For instance, in the late '90s, Apple had the fastest (MHz) computer on the consumer market. It ran Mac OS 8+, which, IME, would crash once or twice a day, forcing you to reboot – in today's environment, classic Mac OS would be dreadfully compromised and simply untenable. Windows 9x seemed like it should be safer, but the sloppy coding methods they used made it actually worse, and when a Windows PC crashed, more often than not, the typical user would end up doing a nuke-and-pave on the HD, which was almost never necessary on a classic Mac.

What I am rambling on about is that software/system design is at least as important as mips/spec/gb5/cb23/etc. I believe that Apple will pursue a strategy where GPU TFLOPs  are offset by a more elegant approach. I see where Tom's says the A16 neural engine performanre is 40% improved – which adds, what? 40% is quite a lot. My notion is that they will leverage ML to teach the machine to work smarter, not waste effort on large, homogenous swaths of image but focus on rendering the complex parts. If you can do effectively the same job for less effort, that saves juice and maybe time as well.


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## exoticspice1

Gfxbench shows no improvement. So A16 and A15 have the same GPU.


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## Cmaier

exoticspice1 said:


> Gfxbench shows no improvement. So A16 and A15 have the same GPU.



Perhaps. But if a benchmark shows no improvement it’s a questionable benchmark - the increased bandwidth should cause an increase in performance.


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## Andropov

exoticspice1 said:


> Gfxbench shows no improvement. So A16 and A15 have the same GPU.



Where have you found a Gfxbench benchmark of the A16?


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## exoticspice1

Cmaier said:


> Perhaps. But if a benchmark shows no improvement it’s a questionable benchmark - the increased bandwidth should cause an increase in performance.



But that same benchmark had showed increased pref before you know when Apple actually improved the GPU.
Like from A14 > A15.

For the first time Apple's GPU did not get new cores.


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## exoticspice1

Andropov said:


> Where have you found a Gfxbench benchmark of the A16?






source:


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## Jimmyjames

Not what I’m seeing. Not sure why the gfxbench listed excluded 4K.


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## Andropov

Jimmyjames said:


> Not what I’m seeing. Not sure why the gfxbench listed excluded 4K.



Why does the iPhone 14 Pro appear three times?


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## exoticspice1

Jimmyjames said:


> Not what I’m seeing. Not sure why the gfxbench listed excluded 4K.
> View attachment 17689



It's miniscule improvement. That's why Apple never even highlighted the A16 GPU because it's the same. They don't even mention it being new on their website.
They just say "5-core GPU".

Any small improvements you see in 4k is only cause of the new memory.


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## Jimmyjames

Andropov said:


> Why does the iPhone 14 Pro appear three times?



No idea. It’s early days and they don’t have many results. Things will become clearer as time goes on I’d imagine. Many of these sites also have a problem with fake results!


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## Jimmyjames

exoticspice1 said:


> It's miniscule improvement. That's why Apple never even highlighted the A16 GPU because it's the same. They don't even mention it being new on their website.
> They just say "5-core GPU".



15fps to 20 or 23 is a small improvement? TIL.

They don’t mention it because they don’t want to draw too much attention to the fact that the 14 is using an old soc.


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## exoticspice1

Jimmyjames said:


> 15fps to 20 or 23 is a small improvement? TIL.



Well in 1080P and 1440P its the same. Also remember iPhone 14 series got better thermal system. Any other improvement is cause of LPDRR5. 

I don't need to argue with you, Apple themselves never said the GPU is new.


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## Andropov

exoticspice1 said:


> It's miniscule improvement. That's why Apple never even highlighted the A16 GPU because it's the same. They don't even mention it being new on their website.
> They just say "5-core GPU".



Well, Gfxbench website lists the median score of the iPhone 13 Pro in 4K Aztec Ruins High at 15.3 fps, and the iPhone 14 Pro at 23.0 fps, which would be a 51% improvement, hardly a minuscule improvement. I don't believe it, but I don't believe the 0%/-1% improvement either. I'll wait until the official review embargo lifts, as we're seeing contradicting leaked results.


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## Andropov

exoticspice1 said:


> Well in 1080P and 1440P its the same. Also remember iPhone 14 series got better thermal system. Any other improvement is cause of LPDRR5.
> 
> I don't need to argue with you, Apple themselves never said the GPU is new.



Well, as far as I can see there's no difference if you look at the best bench result (both iPhone 13 Pro and 14 Pro are 54fps), but median bench results is 38fps for the 13 Pro vs 54fps for the 14 Pro.


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## Jimmyjames

exoticspice1 said:


> Well in 1080P and 1440P its the same. Also remember iPhone 14 series got better thermal system. Any other improvement is cause of LPDRR5.
> 
> I don't need to argue with you, Apple themselves never said the GPU is new.



Why would you exclude the most demanding resolution? All the benchmarks I’ve seen show improvement. The amount varies. Geekbench is 8% iirc and Antutu is huge. Gfxbench seems to show a significant improvement.

We’ll see how it pans out. It’s early days but I don’t see how the conclusion that the gpu is unchanged can be justified.


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## Andropov

Andropov said:


> Well, as far as I can see there's no difference if you look at the best bench result (both iPhone 13 Pro and 14 Pro are 54fps), but median bench results is 38fps for the 13 Pro vs 54fps for the 14 Pro.



I'm going to run GFXBench on my iPhone 13 Pro now. Maybe those 13 Pro 'best' scores are pre-production A16 iPhones misreporting their model number? It's a huge deviation from the median, and it just happens that the best 'iPhone 13 Pro' result matches the median iPhone 14 Pro... could be just a coincidence, sure, but...

Another explanation (if the GPUs truly are the same) could be that the iPhone 13 Pro's best scores pop up when that test is run alone, without previous thermal throttling from other benches, and the iPhone 14 Pro just doesn't throttle due to the new thermal system so the median almost matches the best result. Idk. Still should show some improvement due to memory bandwidth improvements.


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## Andropov

Andropov said:


> Another explanation (if the GPUs truly are the same) could be that the iPhone 13 Pro's best scores pop up when that test is run alone, without previous thermal throttling from other benches, and the iPhone 14 Pro just doesn't throttle due to the new thermal system so the median almost matches the best result. Idk. Still should show some improvement due to memory bandwidth improvements.



Maybe this is it: testing a single test (to avoid thermal throttling), I can get quite close to the median iPhone 14 Pro results: I got 20.6 fps in 4K Aztec Ruins (High Tier) Offscreen (median iPhone 13 Pro: 15.8 fps, median iPhone 14 Pro: 23fps).

The result I got the first time (running all tests) in 4K Aztec Ruins (High Tier) Offscreen is 11.5fps, even worse than the median iPhone 13 Pro result, so clearly thermal throttling plays an important role here.


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## exoticspice1

E


Andropov said:


> Maybe this is it: testing a single test (to avoid thermal throttling), I can get quite close to the median iPhone 14 Pro results: I got 20.6 fps in 4K Aztec Ruins (High Tier) Offscreen (median iPhone 13 Pro: 15.8 fps, median iPhone 14 Pro: 23fps).
> 
> The result I got the first time (running all tests) in 4K Aztec Ruins (High Tier) Offscreen is 11.5fps, even worse than the median iPhone 13 Pro result, so clearly thermal throttling plays an important role here.



See, any improvement you see on iPhone 14 Pro is due to the new thermal design and LPDRR5 not because of a new GPU design.


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## Jimmyjames

exoticspice1 said:


> E
> 
> See, any improvement you see on iPhone 14 Pro is due to the new thermal design and LPDRR5 not because of a new GPU design.



It’s not that long ago you claimed there was no improvement!


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## Andropov

exoticspice1 said:


> See, any improvement you see on iPhone 14 Pro is due to the new thermal design and LPDRR5 not because of a new GPU design.



Could be, but I'll still wait for proper reviews to come. Just as my 4K Aztec Ruins (High Tier) Offscreen got a low score the first time I ran it (because I ran all tests at once), the leaked iPhone 14 Pro results could be lower for the same reason. That'd also explain why there's not much of a difference between the median and best scores while in other results they're huge.


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## exoticspice1

Jimmyjames said:


> It’s not that long ago you claimed there was no improvement!



I meant the GPU cores themselves. There is no improvement to those. However the thermal design and LPDRR5 does eek out a bit more fps.


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## diamond.g

I dislike gfxbench, 3dmark wildlife is better imo, but has anyone had a chance to run gfxbench on their new iPhone 14 Pro (Max) yet?


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## Cmaier

diamond.g said:


> I dislike gfxbench, 3dmark wildlife is better imo, but has anyone had a chance to run gfxbench on their new iPhone 14 Pro (Max) yet?



Running it now


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## diamond.g

This is my score.


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## Cmaier

diamond.g said:


> I dislike gfxbench, 3dmark wildlife is better imo, but has anyone had a chance to run gfxbench on their new iPhone 14 Pro (Max) yet?




First screenful of scores attached. Don’t see an easy way to export from gfxbench.


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## Joelist

Okay...my new iPhone 14 Pro Max.

GeekBench CPU 1907 single 5502 multicore.


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## Cmaier

Perhaps some answers:

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1573078683006668800/


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## Cmaier

From die photos, looks to me like the new e-cores are quite different. The photo is not very good, though, so I’ll be looking forward to better ones.


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## diamond.g

Is the GPU performance increase purely due to increased clocks and bandwidth? It is implied that the GPU's are the same size/layout.


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## Cmaier

diamond.g said:


> Is the GPU performance increase purely due to increased clocks and bandwidth? It is implied that the GPU's are the same size/layout.




Hard to say. When they say “layout“ they don’t mean “layout“ the way that CPU designers mean it. The orientation and shape of the blocks does appear to be the same.  The photos are not sufficiently sharp to allow anyone to tell if what’s inside the blocks is the same.

So far, though, I’d say that available evidence suggests that there is little new in the GPUs.  

Of course, that tells us nothing about the M-series -  there isn’t a lot of reason for apple to focus on GPU performance on iphones until there is a new use case that demands more performance.


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## theorist9

A bit less fuzzy than the above shot, and unannotated--not sure if I quite matched the two halves up:


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## Cmaier

theorist9 said:


> A bit less fuzzy than the above shot, and unannotated--not sure if I quite matched the two halves up:



Still way too fuzzy for me to be able to determine what the blocks are.


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