Apple's A-series chips have always been known for their performance a year to two years ahead of their friends, but this year's launch of the A16 Bionic chip seems somewhat not Apple's style.

Although the CPU performance is still riding high, A16's lead in GPU is no longer obvious, especially the recently released Qualcomm 2nd generation Snapdragon 8 chip, GPU performance has been achieved to overtake the A16 series.

Apple is really due to & ldquo; hit all over the world & rdquo; so slackened, choose to stop and so on friendly business? Perhaps things are not as simple as imagined.

In the history of Apple smartphones, the iPhone 14 series is considered very “peculiar ” generation. The previous year, the iPhone 13 series mini models became extinct, the standard version and Pro version of the differentiation between the more obvious.

A large number of users opted for the Pro model resulting in dismal sales of the standard version.The newly launched iPhone 14 Plus has also not been able to revive the sales performance of the standard version, but Apple still gained revenue growth with the Pro version……

This, the A16 series received more discussion than in previous years, and people found that this year's A16 seems to have lost the kind of dominance it used to have.

This issue was mentioned in a report by The Information a few days ago. The story was meant to discuss the crisis facing Apple's semiconductor division, but it also gives us some insight into why the A16 GPU performance is flopping.

The report points out that Apple engineers “ are too ambitious in adding new features ” thatLate in the development cycle it was discovered that the prototype chip's GPU power consumption was much higher than expected simulation estimates, which meant that serious thermal issues would be raised.

And lead to the battery life is affected and can not be used, to be safe, Apple can not be equipped with “ new features ” GPU for the iPhone 14 Pro series.

We turn to the A16 bionic, the launch simply mentioned a 50% increase in GPU memory bandwidth, which now seems to be a bit of a cover-up.

A16 single-core performance compared to the A15 processor full-blooded version is only about 8%, multi-core performance is also only about 10%, the design performance did not meet the expected requirements. The GPU test results show that the GPU performance of the A16 is almost the same as the A15 full-blooded version.

This operation is known as Apple “s unprecedented ” blunder. Due to the absence of an updated design, the GPU in the A16 Bionic chip is not a significant upgrade from last year's GPU.

Apple has allegedly been developing a GPU that supports hardware ray tracing as well as other features, but Apple is not providing any more details at this time.

Strong as Apple also dare not risk the risk of increased power consumption, increased heat, and the resulting significant reduction in battery life is a problem that Apple can not afford.

History tells us what kind of reputation a chip will bring when its power consumption and heat generation are too high, and when a model is criticized by consumers for its battery and power consumption, it is destined to become a generation of failure.

Apple's semiconductor division is struggling to maintain its year-over-year leadership in performance and power efficiency improvements, especially after the departure of key figures such as Gerard Williams III and Mike Filippo, The Information said.

Gerard Williams III, a top CPU designer, is known to have left Apple in 2019 to run his own startup, Nuvia, while his replacement, Mike Filippo, is rumored to have clashed with the engineer and left Apple earlier this year to join Microsoft.

As a direct competitor to Apple's A series chips, the 2nd generation Snapdragon 8 and MediaTek Skyguard 9200 both support hardware-level ray tracing, achieving a reverse for the A16 in terms of GPU.

The long term impact of the Apple semiconductor team fiasco on the A17 bionic and iPhone 15 is still unclear, but we have seen Qualcomm and MediaTek slowly start to close the gap with Apple.

Although Apple has a wealth of experience in chip design and technology accumulation, but do not rule out the possibility that Apple will continue to struggle in 2023.

How long will the impact of the A16 rollover last? It depends on when Apple's semiconductor team will get back on the right track.

Usually, at this point in time, the next generation of A-series chips are already under development. let's wait and see if the A17 bionic chip can revive and take back the advantage.