Before analyzing the strength of the two, it is necessary to understand that the A15 of the iPhone 13 is a standard version with only four Gpus. The A15 on the iPhone 13 Pro is an enhanced version with five Gpus. The A15 on the iPad mini 6 is a reduced version of the A15 on the iPhone 13 Pro.
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The same goes for the M1, which has a seven-GPU version for the MacBook Air and the iMac. There is also an 8-GPU version for the MacBook Pro, iMac, and iPad Pro. For the sake of description, the five GPU non-downcelled version of the A15 and the eight GPU M1 are discussed below.
I believe that most people will take it for granted that M1 must be stronger. After all, the M1 gave the impression that it was for the Mac! You don't have to tell me. I don't know. Apple has piled up enough material on the A15, simply putting a square chip into a rectangle. This year's A15 is much larger than last year's A14, and the number of transistors alone has increased by 3.2 billion to 15 billion. And this incredibly powerful M1, in fact, only 16 billion transistors. From this point of view, is there already a certain comparability?
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So first of all, we can draw a preliminary conclusion that in the case of single-core CPU, A15 and M1 performance is comparable. In terms of multi-core performance, whether it is CPU or GPU, M1 can beat A15. In fact, this is also easy to understand, after all, computers really have a lot of multitasking needs, and power consumption is not as harsh as mobile phones.
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However, the same 16-core neural network engine, but the A15 speed reached 15.8TOPS, while the M1 actually only 11TOPS, A15 almost 44% faster ah!
In terms of energy efficiency, the A15 has actually put more effort than the M1. For example, although the A15 is a mobile phone chip, its level 2 cache reaches an astonishing 12MB, which is a 50% increase compared to the A14. If it is compared with Qualcomm's chip, it is almost twice the sum of Snapdragon 888 II and III caches. Even the M1 desktop chip, in fact, the level 2 cache is only 12MB. Yes, the A15's secondary cache is desktop-level chip level.
Another magic weapon for Apple's chip performance and energy efficiency is actually SLC, which is system-level cache. This device can significantly avoid frequent access to DRAM, the main role is not only to reduce latency, but also to significantly reduce access to high-energy DRAM ah! In my impression, the A12 only has 8MB SLC, the A13 and A14 have been raised to 16MB, and this year's A15 has been directly raised to 32MB. When it comes to mobile phone chip stacking, I really haven't seen more ruthless than Apple!
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How crazy is this thing? May wish to compare the Snapdragon 888, the SLC equipped with this goods is 3MB, almost one-tenth of the A15! The M1 is essentially more like an upgrade of the A14, no official SLC data on the M1 can be found, but it is basically certain that the M1 SLC is not less than 16MB, but it should not reach 32MB. Not less than 16MB because the specifications of this product will not be lower than A14, and not higher than 32MB because from the perspective of the SLC part of M1, it should not reach 32MB scale.
So, in terms of energy efficiency, the A15 is actually a step further.
But to be honest, these two different uses of the chip, in fact, pure comparison does not make much sense. What really matters is that both have done the best they can in their respective fields. When Apple announced the MacBook Air M1, it said that even if it removed the fan and gave up active cooling, its performance was better than 98% of similar products on the market. When the M1 was used in the iPad Pro, it was once again shocked by the ultra-high energy efficiency of the M1.
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Compared with the A15 and A14, the intuitive performance improvement is not obvious. But from another perspective, the A15 is still unbeatable. Compared with competitors, A15's CPU and GPU are both 50% ahead, in fact, some actual data is to prove that Apple once again falsified the data, because the actual performance should be around 62%. Compared with the A14, the energy efficiency of the A15 has been improved once again. It is really great to be able to achieve such an improvement without significantly changing the process!
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A final word on those two special A15 chips, the one used in the iPhone 13 and the iPhone 13 mini, is missing a GPU, which is 30% better than its rivals. In fact, there is no need to worry about the weakening of GPU performance, in fact, the iPhone 13 Pro has more than one GPU, which is more to give ProMotion adaptive refresh rate service.
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The other is used on the iPad mini 6, but the iPhone 13 Pro's A15 has been reduced. At the product level, it should be in order to maintain the performance of the iPad Air 4, and their performance is actually not a good choice for Apple.
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In terms of chip cost, it is possible to reduce the frequency of chips that do not reach 3.2GHz in the A15 mass production chips. However, the performance in actual use is still slightly stronger than the A14 of the iPad Air 4! So if you choose these two products, you don't have to worry about performance, as long as you choose the most suitable size for yourself.