MARCH 2020 MACWORLD 85Apple will add Neural Engine cores this
time, and may make other architectural
improvements as well.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see Apple
claim that machine learning tasks are at
least twice as fast as on the A13.
Apple doesn’t really provide performance
details for its imaging processing engine, but
the push for better camera quality is never-
ending, so it’ll probably be better, too.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that I think
the A14 will be Apple’s first chip with
hardware decoding of the AV1 video
codec (go.macworld.com/av1v), and might
even have hardware encoding support. If
so, expect Apple to spend some time on
stage talking about how videos shot with
the iPhone 12 are smaller and higher
quality than ever before.
FASTER LPDDR5 RAM
Apple has been using LPDDR4 memory in its
iPhone SoCs for years. It first made the jump
from LPDDR3 to LPDDR4 in the A9 in 2015,
and then to LPDDR4x (a faster and slightly
more power-efficient version) in the A11 in- The A12 and A13 used the same RAM,
as far as the teardowns can determine.
But we’re on the cusp of the next
generation of low-power mobile memory.
The spec for LPDDR5 was finalized last year,
and already Samsung has begun production,
with SK-Hynix (another popular RAM supplier
for Apple) to begin soon. High-end Android
phones will first ship with the RAM in the first
half of this year, making it likely that the
iPhone (at least the high-end models) will
follow suit at the end of the year.
What’s the benefit? Well, the current
Samsung’s making
LPDDR5 now, for phones
shipping this year. Apple
may be one of them.