48 MACWORLD JUNE 2019
iOSCENTRAL APPLE’S A13 CHIPIMAGE PROCESSING AND
NEURAL ENGINE
I started this examination by stating I
believe Apple will make the A13 about 25
percent larger than the A12, while also
using a manufacturing process that lets it
cram more transistors into a smaller area.
The result would be a chip of around 10
billion transistors—an increase of more
than 40 percent over the A12. So if the
CPU and GPU will achieve only modest
and predictable improvements from
design tweaks and clock speed
improvements, where will Apple spend all
that extra transistor budget?
I think that the company is going to
continue to drive very heavily in the
direction of on-device machine learning
and image processing.
Last year, Apple improved the Neural
Engine in the A12 by far more than
expected. The A11’s Neural Engine can do
600 billion operations per second, and
Apple made the A12 about eight times
faster at 5 trillion operations per second.
I’m not sure we’ll see a leap that big, but
Apple may well achieve a 3x to 5x
improvement with some smart design
improvements and a much bigger
transistor budget.
Machine Learning and AI are critical
parts of the iPhone experience, from
taking better photos and videos to
augmented reality and Siri. If Apple
announced that the A13’s Neural Engine
could do 20 trillion operations per second,
I would be impressed, but not surprised.
The image signal processor used to
process data from the camera sensors is
another critical component that is hard to
benchmark, but Apple invests heavily in it
every year. It is used in conjunction with
the Neural Engine and GPU to improve
photos and video quality. Apple will
improve it again this year. It might even be
one of the first to include hardware to
encode and decode the new AV1 video
codec, a royalty-free video compression
standard expected to succeed today’s
HEVC, AVC, and VP9 formats. If you don’t
know what all that means, just know that
most web video (think YouTube) will
probably transition to this new video
format in a couple years. It’s extremely
efficient and isn’t wrapped up in a web of
complex royalties.STILL NO 5G
While the modems in iPhones aren’t part
of Apple’s A-series processor, it’s worth
discussion what we should expect this
year. You’re going to hear a lot about 5G
this year, and carriers will try to push
customers toward new 5G phones this
fall. But make no mistake: 5G is in its
infancy. The networks are small and
limited, and will remain so through 2019.
The mobile modems that enable 5G are