Apple’s A15 Bionic CPU, which powered the iPhone 13 series, iPhone SE, and iPad mini 6, had two performance cores and four power-efficient cores. This time, however, the company’s chip binning strategy may not be limited to GPU cores alone, as the same A15 Bionic running in the 2022 Apple TV 4K has a 5-core CPU, one less than what is present on Apple’s other devices.
Apple is using a lower-end A15 Bionic processor, as the new Apple TV 4K has fewer GPU cores as well. The tvOS TV Info app provided useful information about the latest Apple TV 4K, which was eventually discovered by FlatpanelsHD (via MacRumors). Apple appears to have equipped the device with a slower A15 Bionic processor with fewer CPU and GPU cores.
All four iPhone models used the same A15 Bionic processor, but the differences were discovered after some digging. Of course, the difference in GPU cores meant that the faster chipset delivered a 55 percent increase in graphics performance over the A14 Bionic powering the iPhone 12 family.
While the website does not specify how many performance and power-efficient cores comprise the A15 Bionic, it does state that the 2022 Apple TV 4K is approximately 40% faster than the previous-generation model powered by the A12 Bionic. In terms of GPU performance, the new device is roughly 30% faster than its predecessor.
Despite talking about this change, we’d like to conduct our own investigation to see if Apple made any CPU changes to the A15 Bionic. In related news, the iPad mini 6 has the same 4-core GPU as the most recent Apple TV 4K.
