Third, while the A15 chip uses a slightly improved design, it’s still based on a 5nm process, like the A14 preceding it. Second, even this year, in which the A15 chip may have been impacted by the loss of key chip engineers, Apple still pulled off a 10% gain. First, Apple is the clear leader in mobile chips, so even incrementally smaller gains each year are still always from the highest base in the industry. There are a few things to note about this. This shows a rather different picture, showing an overall downward trend from the A9 chip onwards. But second, in the red line, he plots the year-on-year percentage improvements. First, we see the absolute performance gains each year, which appears to be a relatively steady upward progress. In particular, if you upgrade every three to four years, as the average smartphone user does these days, you’re going to see around a doubling in performance …Ĭreative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin put together the above chart showing annual single-core performance gains every year from the A7 chip in the iPhone 5S to the A15 chip in the iPhone 13. A chart showing iPhone performance gains over the years shows that diminishing returns have largely set in, but the overall gains are still impressive.
