Apple A13 Bionic vs Intel Core i5-6350HQ

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 i5-6350HQ

The Intel Core i5-6350HQ is a fast quad-core processor for notebooks based on the Skylake architecture and was announced in the beginning of 2016. Besides four CPU cores (no Hyperthreading support), which are clocked at 2.3-3.2 GHz (probable Turbo steps: 4 cores: up to 2.8 GHz, 2 cores: up to 3.0 GHz), the processor also integrates the Iris Pro Graphics P580 as well as a dual-channel memory controller (DDR3L-1600/DDR4-2133). It is manufactured in a 14 nm process with FinFET transistors. 

Compared to the Core i5-6300HQ, the i5-6350HQ does have a much more powerful GPU, but does not support the instruction set extension TSX-NI in return.

Architecture

Intel uses Skylake to replace both Broadwell as well as Haswell and therefore uses one core design for all TDP classes between 4.5-45 Watts. Several improvements of the Skylake architecture include bigger Out-to-Order-Buffer, optimizations for pre-fetching as well as bigger gains by Hyperthreading. However, the changes are small for a "Tock" – a new micro architecture – in general, so the per-MHz performance is only between 5-10 % (compared to Haswell) or less than 5 % higher (compared to Broadwell), respectively.

The Core i5-6350HQ also benefits from the additional eDRAM cache in some cases, which can accelerate memory-heavy applications in particular.

Performance

Depending on the effect of the eDRAM cache, the i5-6350HQ is roughly on par with the i7-4700HQ (Haswell) when you stress up to four cores. If the software does support more cores, however, the Core i5 will fall behind by up to 25 % due to the lack of Hyperthreading. Still, even the most demanding applications and excessive multi-tasking are no problem for the CPU.

Graphics

The integrated GPU with the designation Iris Pro Graphics P580 (also known as "GT4e") represents the fastest version of the Skylake GPU (Intel Gen. 9). 72 Execution Units (EUs) run at 350 up to 900 MHz in this case and allow a performance comparable to a dedicated mainstream chip. The GPU might be able to compete with a GeForce 945M under perfect conditions and it is therefore the fastest iGPU on the market by a pretty big margin. Modern games from 2015/2016 can usually be played smoothly at medium settings. More information about the performance and the features is available on our dedicated page for the Iris Pro Graphics P580.

Power Consumption

According to its TDP of 45 Watts, the chip is primarily designed for bigger notebooks starting with 15-inch screens. The TDP can optionally be reduced to 35 Watts (cTDP down), but this would obviously affect the performance.