iPad A11, A13 and A16 Bionic

[Homme]

But primarily the A11 more than the other two for one primarily reason, lack of iPad Support but those 3 chips which seperate from the other A series chips since A5, the lack of an X chip for the A11 and A13 ( and an M variant for the A16).

I always found it fascinating that the 3 SoC’s never had a supercharged variant and Apple was smart not to put one in all 3 of them ( the other A series chips there had always been a good reason)

A11 because of a few reasons the gap between A10X and A12X iPads release dates ( not to mention the redesign) and A10X being delayed initially by a few months closer to the launch of A11 iPhones but unfortunately A11 is the most neglected A series chip being on 3 devices (iPhones)

A13 although it is more products than A11 and A16 (so far though ) was released between the A12 and WWDC 2020 when Apple announced the transition to Apple silicon. I see why there was no A13X ( when we all thought 4th gen iPad was going to get it when it was revealed instead of A12Z) but Apple silicon in the Mac from the M1 is the primarily reason alongside A13 being a slightly enhanced version of A12 ( I know there was a A12Z version of the Mac mini to transition to Apple silicion for developers but yeah)

A16s case for not getting a variant primarily is the obvious one in the room being that it was not only another 5nm ( redesigned 4nm) but also we had the A14 and A15X lines ( M1 and M2) being on 5nm was another case. A16 is just an enhanced A15 with not only a GPU similar to A15 but compared to A17/M3 the GPU was redesigned for A16 but it was bad enough for ray tracing because of 5nm that they had to go back to using a modified version of A15’s GPU for A16 so I’m happy Apple skipped an M variant of A16 for an M version of A17 because M1 and M2 is used in plenty of devices

Add that the A16 only going to 3 iDevices so far ( including the iPad 11th generation if the rumors are true) it can end up being another A11 Bionic ( not being neglected in a way like it but Apple is pushing out A18 when there is a non A17 pro)

I was really bored making this so feel free to say your opinion

 

[Slartibart]

I was really bored making this so feel free to say your opinion

IMHO you should make it clearer what the exact subject or theme is, you want people to comment on. 🤓

 

[Populus]

The reason is, from my point of view, mainly because the following (or previous) SoC were a big jump in performance/efficiency, and the aforementioned chips are just refinements?

Although the A11 would be an exception. It’s in-between two very different architectures, the necessary chip design to transition from a more traditional chip (A9, A10 Fusion) to one with a big projection into Machine Learning (A12 Bionic). It was the first chip with a Neural Engine, needed for the first FaceID on the iPhone X, but with only two cores it was really limited. The big oomph for ML came with the A12 and it’s 8-core Neural Engine.

So, yeah, all of them are either transitional chips or refinements, such as the A13 (a refinement over the A12, both built at 7nm), or the A16 (an emergence iteration of the A15, because the 3nm process was delayed).

The chips used… oh wait. You already did the analysis I was doing. I guess my work here is done, but I’m not deleting the message because I spent 12 minutes typing it.