Apple has made unprecedented improvements in the A19 and A19 Pro chips compared to the previous generation A18 and A18 Pro chipsets. New analyses show that the current flagship chips powering the iPhone 17 series have shrunk by up to 10 percent in die area.
The A19 series makes a difference
Detailed analyses reveal that Apple has managed to fit higher-performance cores, a larger Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and increased efficiency cores into the chip while reducing the overall size.
TSMC’s latest 3nm N3P manufacturing node provides only a 4 percent reduction in die area compared to the previous N3E node. Despite this, Apple has implemented significant improvements in the A19 and A19 Pro chips in a single generation using intelligent design innovations.
Recent comparisons show that the A19 Pro has a die area 10 percent smaller than the A18 Pro, and the A19 has a die area 9 percent smaller than the A18. The fact that Apple achieved up to 10 percent reduction, despite TSMC only offering a 4 percent reduction, highlights its mastery of chip design.
Engineers at the Cupertino-based company used a more efficient layout for the remaining space, housing components such as the Image Signal Processor (ISP) and media engine, freeing up additional space for efficiency cores and GPU area.
It’s noted that the performance cores, which run at higher clock speeds in both the A19 and A19 Pro, have also shrunk by 4 percent. This could explain why the difference between the performance cores isn’t significant.
However, Apple’s success with efficiency cores is remarkable. The major architectural changes in the A19 Pro resulted in up to a 29 percent performance increase with virtually no additional power consumption.
These efficiency cores not only support the A19 Pro’s multi-core gains, but also, thanks to significant efficiency upgrades, enable Apple’s flagship iPhone chip to boast the best ‘performance per watt’ benchmark in Geekbench 6 among current-generation premium chipsets like the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Dimensity 9500.
