Apple A16 Bionic vs WonderMedia PRIZM WM8950 vs Renesas MP5232

Apple A16 Bionic

The Apple A16 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 14 Pro (2022) models. It offers 6 cores divided in two performance cores (codename Everest, up to 3.46 GHz) and four power-efficiency cores (codename Sawtooth, up to 2.02). According to Apple, the most improvements were made to the efficiency cores and the improved memory bandwidth (+50% thanks to LPDDR5). According to the die analysis from angstronomics, the e-core cluster still has the same 4 MB L2 cache, but the p-cores now offer 16 MB L2 cache. The SLC (System Level Cache) however seems to be reduced to 24 MB.

The Neural Engine still offers 16 cores and offers an increased performance of 17 TOPS (vs. 15.8 of the A15) for AI tasks. The integrated graphics engine still offers 5 cores and benefits mostly from the higher memory bandwidth. The new display engine supports adaptive refresh rates down to 1 Hz, the new always-on display, and improved anti-aliasing (for the dynamic island animations).

The CPU performance only shows small improvements to the last generation (Apple A15 Bionic). Still, the A16 is by far the fastest mobile CPU for smartphones and leaves e.g. the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 easily behind (in Geekbench 5.4 single- and multi-thread tests).

The chip is manufactured in the modern 4nm process at TSMC and integrates nearly 16 billion transistors (compared to the 15.8 billion of the A15 and 11.8 of the A14). Apple emphasized on efficiency and e.g. mentioned 20% power savings for the big performance cores and class-leading efficiency of the e-cores.

WonderMedia PRIZM WM8950

The VIA WonderMedia PRIZM WM8950 is an entry-level SoC for smartphones and tablets. It is aimed at Android 4.x and Windows CE devices and includes a single core Cortex-A9 processor at 1 GHz, an ARM Mali 400 (MP2?) graphics card, multi-standard 1080p video decoding, H.264 video encoding, a DDR3, LPDDR2 memory controller and a hardware security engine.

Renesas MP5232

The Renesas MP5232 is an entry level ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core SoC with integrated LTE cat. 4 radio. It aims at "cheap" Android based smartphones with LTE between 150 and 300 Dollars. Both CPU cores are clocked at up to 1.5 GHz, although e.g. in the Samsung Galaxy Core LTE SM-G386F they are limited to 1.2 GHz. In addition to the ARM processor cores, the MP5232 features a PowerVR SGX544 graphics card, LTE cat. 4 / DC-HSPA+ 3G / Edge radio, 1080p video de- and encoder, and a 20 MP ISP.