Apple Reveals 5nm A14 Bionic SoC on New iPad Air

Apple A14 Bionic
(Image credit: Apple)

During an online event today, Apple announced its latest silicon, the A14 Bionic. It's built on a 5nm processor and has six CPU cores, four GPU cores and a 16-core neural engine. The chip will debut in the new iPad Air, which will go on sale next month starting at $599.

The SoC has 11.8 billion transistors, which Apple said was quite the challenge, considering you're getting into measurements made in atoms. 

The CPU's six cores are broken into four high-efficiency cores and two high-performance cores. Apple claimed the offering's 40% faster than the previous generation and that graphics, via four cores, are 30% faster.

Apple's neural engine has 16 cores for 11 trillion operations per second, and, for the first time on iPad, is paired with a machine learning accelerator for matrix multiplication.

There's also an update to the secure enclave, which now works with a new version of Touch ID built into the iPad Air's power button, rather than a dedicated home button like older iPads.

Additionally, the iPad Air is getting a new liquid retina display, Wi-Fi 6 and USB Type-C.

Apple also announced the dual-core S6 for Apple Watch and moved the 8th Gen iPad to the A12 Bionic, which debuted in the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max.

Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

  • thisisaname
    Who is making it and how does this "5nm" node compare with other fabs?

    Edit seems it is made by Taiwan's TSMC .
    Reply