Apple A16 Bionic vs HiSilicon Kirin 820e

Apple A16 Bionic

The Apple A16 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 14 Pro (2022) models. It offers 6 cores divided in two performance cores (codename Everest, up to 3.46 GHz) and four power-efficiency cores (codename Sawtooth, up to 2.02). According to Apple, the most improvements were made to the efficiency cores and the improved memory bandwidth (+50% thanks to LPDDR5). According to the die analysis from angstronomics, the e-core cluster still has the same 4 MB L2 cache, but the p-cores now offer 16 MB L2 cache. The SLC (System Level Cache) however seems to be reduced to 24 MB.

The Neural Engine still offers 16 cores and offers an increased performance of 17 TOPS (vs. 15.8 of the A15) for AI tasks. The integrated graphics engine still offers 5 cores and benefits mostly from the higher memory bandwidth. The new display engine supports adaptive refresh rates down to 1 Hz, the new always-on display, and improved anti-aliasing (for the dynamic island animations).

The CPU performance only shows small improvements to the last generation (Apple A15 Bionic). Still, the A16 is by far the fastest mobile CPU for smartphones and leaves e.g. the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 easily behind (in Geekbench 5.4 single- and multi-thread tests).

The chip is manufactured in the modern 4nm process at TSMC and integrates nearly 16 billion transistors (compared to the 15.8 billion of the A15 and 11.8 of the A14). Apple emphasized on efficiency and e.g. mentioned 20% power savings for the big performance cores and class-leading efficiency of the e-cores.

HiSilicon Kirin 820e

The HiSilicon Kirin 820e is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced 2022 and contains 8 processor cores. One fast ARM Cortex-A76 core with up to 2.22 GHz, three addition A76 cores at up to 2 and four efficiency Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.84 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a 5G modem and a fast mid-range ARM Mali-G57 MP6 graphics card. For AI acceleration, the Kirin 820 integrates a DaVinci NPU. Compared to the similar named Kirin 820, the 820e offers slower clocked CPU cores on a level with the older Kirin 810.

The chip should also integrate Bluetooth 5 and WiFi 6.

The SoC is manufactured in the modern 7nm process at TSMC and therefore should be very energy efficient.