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Apple's A14 Chip Rumored to Become First Arm-Based Mobile Processor to Exceed 3GHz

Apple's unreleased A14 chip is rumored to be the first Arm-based mobile processor to officially exceed 3GHz, according to a new report by Research Snipers.

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Apple's A14 processor, the successor to the A13 chip in both the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro, is expected to debut this fall in Apple's "iPhone 12" models. The report highlights the suspected Geekbench 4 score of the A14 chip, with a frequency reaching 3.1GHz. This would be 400MHz higher than Apple's current A13 Bionic chip with a frequency of 2.7GHz.

At such a frequency, the chip's Geekbench 5 running points have surged. The report mentions that the A14's single-core performance shows a score of 1658 (up 25% from the A13), and a multi-core score of 4612 points (up 33% from the A13). The extra processing power will be helpful in running simultaneous workflows, navigating through apps, and more.

Apple chipmaker TSMC is expected to ramp up production of Apple's 5nm-based A14 chipsets in as early as April of this year.

In addition to the A14 chip, rumors recently have mentioned both Arm processors with Mac Pro level performance and a Mac with an Apple-designed Arm processor are in the works.

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Top Rated Comments

MacLawyer Avatar
85 months ago
In this time of unrest and uncertainty news like this is refreshing and good for morale!
Score: 34 Votes (Like | Disagree)
85 months ago
Do you remember that keynote when Steve Jobs actually apologized because Apple didn’t keep the promise of putting a 3Ghz G5 processor in their top of the line workstation?
Now they are putting a processor that runs circles around it, in a phone.
Score: 30 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cmaier Avatar
85 months ago

You must not do a lot of video exporting....
From an iPhone? No. Right tool for the job.
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)
fakejobs Avatar
85 months ago
"In addition to the A14 chip, rumors recently have mentioned both Arm processors with Mac Pro level performance and a Mac with an Apple-designed Arm processor are in the works."

Oh, I'm getting hard.
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cmaier Avatar
85 months ago

That's nice for the 1 second it will run at 3 GHz. Apple is the king of throttling.
It’s a phone. The necessity to run for an extended time at 3GHz is dubious. Plus, power consumption is equal to C times voltage squared times the frequency, so reducing the frequency when high speed is not required is a very good idea in a phone.

Now, think about 16 of these cores, with appropriate thermal solution, in a MacBook, and we are talking about something very cool.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cmaier Avatar
85 months ago

This has been apples main performance gain for recent generations. Easy to wow people with performance gains only to do it by increasing frequency. True architectural improvements have been fairly minor. Most of this probably came with drop to 5nm. Instead of increasing battery life Apple pushed performance.
Nope.

Frequency increase is 14%, but single core performance is 25% higher. 11% of the performance increase had to have come from architectural improvements.

And unless they added cores, the multi core performance increase of 33% means even more architectural improvements.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)