Apple A13 Bionic vs Intel Core i5-6287U

Apple A13 Bionic

The Apple A13 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 11 series. It was announced late 2019 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. Compared to the previous A12 Bionic, the A13 should offer a 20% improved CPU performance at 40% lower power (according to Apple).

With 8.5 billion transistors, the A13 Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion).

Intel Core i5-6287U

The Intel Core i5-6287U is a dual-core SoC based on the Skylake architecture and has been launched in September 2015. The CPU can be found in medium-sized ultrabooks as well as normal notebooks. In addition to two CPU cores with Hyper-Threading clocked at 3.1 - 3.5 GHz (2 cores: max. 3.3 GHz), the chip also integrates an Iris Graphics 550 GPU with 64 MB of eDRAM memory as well as a dual-channel DDR4-2133/DDR3L-1600 memory controller. The SoC is manufactured using a 14 nm process with FinFET transistors.

Architecture

Skylake replaces both Haswell and Broadwell and brings the same microarchitecture in every TDP class from 4.5 to 45 W. The extensive improvements of the Skylake design include increased out-of-order buffers, optimized prefetching and branch prediction as well as additional performance gains through Hyper-Threading. Overall, however, performance per clock has been increased by only 5 to 10 percent (compared to Haswell) respectively under 5 percent (compard to Broadwell), which is quite modest for a new architecture ("Tock").

Furthermore, the organisation of the eDRAM cache has been modified. Instead of acting like a victim cache, which has to be adressed via the L3/LLC, the eDRAM can now be adressed directly by programms just like the main memory. The size is still 128 MB for the quad-core models (4C + GT4e), while the dual-core chips (2C + GT3e) only offer 64 MB.

Performance

According to the specified clock rates and the improved architecture, the Core i5-6287U should perform similar to the former Core i5-5350H (Broadwell) and is one of the fastest mobile dual-cores as of late 2015.

Even demanding applications and multitasking are handled easily.

Graphics

The integrated graphics unit called Iris Graphics 550 represents the "GT3e" version of the Skylake GPU (Intel Gen. 9). The 48 Execution Units, also called EUs, are clocked at 350 - 1100 MHz and offer (thanks to the fast eDRAM cache) a performance similar to a dedicated GeForce 930M. Games of 2015 can thus be played smoothly in low or medium settings. For more information about performance and features, check our page for the Iris Graphics 550.

Power Consumption

Specified at a TDP of 28 W (including CPU, GPU and memory controller), the CPU is best suited for medium-sized notebooks (13-inches and above). Optionally, the TDP can be lowered to 23 watts (cTDP down), reducing both heat dissipation and performance.