Apple's A15 Bionic chip powers iPhone 13 with 15 billion transistors, new graphics and AI
Apple's chip designs have kept its phones faster than the competition for years. This year, iPhone Pro models get more GPU horsepower than regular iPhones.
Stephen Shankland
 
Apple's A15 processor in the iPhone 13 has 15 billion transistors.
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
Apple on Tuesday revealed its iPhone 13's processor, the A15 Bionic, a chip with 15 billion transistors and new graphics and AI abilities.
Transistors are the core circuitry elements that process and store data on chips, and the count this year is significantly higher than the 11.8 billion on the A14 chip that powers iPhone 12 models introduced in 2020. Miniaturization lets chip designers pack in more transistors for new abilities, though progress in miniaturization has slowed in recent years.
Like its predecessors, the A15 has two high-performance processing cores for the most important work and four high-efficiency cores for background tasks that can run without sapping as much battery power. But Apple says they're faster and supported by a new graphics processing unit (GPU), higher-performance neural engine for AI and machine learning tasks, and a new image signal processor for chores like reducing photo noise. The company unveiled the chip at its iPhone 13 launch event Tuesday.
Apple boasted the A15 has better performance than its competitors, a claim that's been true for years, based on the Geekbench speed test. However, the company didn't offer details about how much better the A15 is compared with the A14. Qualcomm, the top chipmaker for the Android smartphones, acquired startup Nuvia in an attempt to give its processors a big speed boost.
The chip's top job is to maintain the company's top place for smartphone speed, ensure iPhones remain the first device developers reach for when creating new apps, and keep customers happy with snappy performance and a long useful lifespan for the phone.
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