With its chips for iPhone, Apple has become accustomed to be ahead of the competition in terms of power. If this is still the case today, we see that from a graphic point of view, the A16 of the iPhone 14 Pro is treading water while it is accelerating on the side of Qualcomm.
Smartphone chips combine several components within the same system: processor, memory, neural engine, GPU… All founders and manufacturers who develop their own chips, as is the case with Apple, seek to improve all these components but sometimes there are misfires. Thus, the A16 chip, which equips iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, was originally supposed to benefit from a serious boost from its GPU. But Apple had to cancel this project in disaster at the last moment, according to the site The Information.
No ray tracing for the A16
Apple engineers would have shown themselves too ambitious for the chip’s graphics processor, sources say. In particular, it had to integrate support for ray-tracing, in other words more realistic effects for light in games. Apple realized very late in the development of the iPhone 14 Pro that this GPU was producing too much heat and was consuming too much battery. In a smartphone, it is obviously essential to do the maximum to avoid functions that consume too much energy.
The problem having been identified late, the manufacturer might not have done otherwise than to use the GPU of the A15 chip (2021), by making a few small changes all the same. But the additional performance remains quite limited, much more in any case than with the graphics processor originally envisaged. This incident has a priori never happened at Apple in the entire history of its chips, a sign of the difficulties encountered by the teams responsible for developing them.
Apple now lags behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 which supports ray tracing.
