The Apple A9 is a high-end dual-core ARM SoC for smartphones. It was announced in Sept. 2015 in the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Technical details were not published, but the CPU part should be about 70% and the GPU 90% faster than the previous Apple A8. Therefore, the performance should be on par with high-end Android SoCs in 2015.
It is based on the third generation of Apples 64 Bit architectures (Cyclone 3?) and uses a "new transistor technology". It is manufactured at Samsung in 14nm (slightly smaller die) and TSMC at 16nm (both FINFET 3D transistors). A performance difference of both versions are not noticable.
Furthermore, the chip now integrates the M9 motion coprocessor and a 4K video de- and encoder (as the iPhones 6s supports 4K video recording). The integrated graphics card should be still based on PowerVR technology.
The power consumption could be lower than the A8 due to the new process technology and the fact that the iPhones now got a smaller battery (due to the haptic engine part).
The Apple M3 is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple for notebooks that was introduced in late 2023. It integrates a new 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores with up to 4.06 GHz and 4 efficiency cores running at up to 2.75 GHz. Apple claims that the CPU is up to 20% faster than in the old Apple M2 (3.5 GHz).
Due to the higher clock speeds and architecture improvements, the processor performance is also significantly better than the M2 in benchmarks (see e.g. Geekbench below) and can keep up with the fastest CPUs in short single-core tests (like the Raptor Lake i9-13950HX).
The M3 also integrates a new graphics adapter with dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration. According to Apple, it is 20% faster than the GPU in the M2. The chip integrates again 10 GPU cores, but the cheaper variant only offers 8 cores (e.g. in the entry iMac). Furthermore, the GPU only supports 2 displays (an additional 6K60 display to the internal one).
Both GPU and CPU can access the unified memory on the package together. It is still available in 8, 16 and 24 GB variants and offers the same 100 GB/s maximum bandwidth (unlike the Pro models that feature a reduced memory bandwidth).
The integrated 16-core Neural Engine has also been revised and now offers 18 TOPS peak performance (versus 15.8 TOPS in the M2 but 35 TOPS in the new A17 Pro). The video engine now supports AV1 decoding in hardware. H.264, HEVC and ProRes (RAW) can still be decoded and encoded.
Unfortunately, the integrated wireless network module only supports Wi-Fi 6E (no Wi-Fi 7) and due to the support of only a single external monitor, the chip also has to make do with no Thunderbolt 4 (Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 support only for up to 40 Gbit/s).
The chip is manufactured on the current 3nm TSMC process (N3B most likely) and contains 25 billion transistors (+25% vs. Apple M2). The 3nm process should also contribute to the excellent efficiency of the chip. Under load, the M3 CPU consumes approximately 20 Watt.
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
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