Macworld - USA (2020-03)

MARCH 2020 MACWORLD 83

took a dramatic leap in the A13—far

beyond what recent trends would have

predicted. I expected a score around

4,800, and Apple delivered well over

6,000! It was enough to beat the latest

Android phones, but newer models have

since pushed a little higher, and top-tier

Android phones released this year will go

much further.

I expect Apple to expend significant

transistor budget making the GPU more

powerful. Along with more memory

bandwidth, we can probably expect GPU

performance well beyond the trend line’s

prediction of the low 7,000 range in this

test. Barring some new performance

bottleneck, I think a score over 9,500 is

certainly possible. In other words, I think

we can expect a 50 percent improvement

in graphics performance for the kind of

high-end graphics used in games.

improvement from better scheduling. But
with the big jump in transistor density from
5nm, Apple might add a third big core, or
significantly boost performance of the
high-efficiency cores, which would really
boost multi-threaded performance.
The trend line gives us a score around
4,500, but I think a combination of
architectural changes and clock speed will
give us a lot more. I wouldn’t be surprised
if the Geekbench 5 multi-core score
creeps up to 5,000 or so.
For what it’s worth, the fastest Android
phones score around 3,000 on this test,
and a score of 5,000 would be similar to
6-core mainstream desktop CPUs or
high-end laptop CPUs. It’s 15-inch MacBook
Pro territory.

GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE
The iPhone has been, from the very debut
of the App Store, a gaming device. But
gaming has never been more important to
Apple than it is now with its Apple Arcade
service. Graphics performance makes
games shine, true, but the GPU is also
used for computational functions in image
processing, machine learning, and plenty
of other tasks.
In other words, GPU performance is
critical and Apple is not going to tread
water with the A14.
If we take a look at the 3DMark Sling
Shot Extreme Unlimited test, performance

Graphics performance took a big leap with the

A13. I think the A14 will deliver a similar leap.

A8 A9 A10 A11 A12 A13 A14*

8000

6000

4000

2000

0

3DMARK

SLING SHOT EXTREME UNLIMITIED

HIGHER SCORES ARE BETTER

4067

6497

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