Home Tech Chipsets Apple A8 Benchmark Review, Specs & Phones

Apple A8 Benchmark Review, Specs & Phones

Apple A8 is the name of Apple’s designed second-generation 64-bit system-on-a-chip, which was introduced in September 2014 alongside the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Apple is known for superb products and it’s always in the search for developing new mobile technologies to suit consumers pressing want. After the likes of Apple A6 and A7 chipsets, Apple is out with the A8 chip.

Process Technology (nm)

The A8 chip is manufactured on a 20 nanometer process by Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC, which replaced Samsung as the manufacturer of Apple’s mobile device processors.

It is estimated to contain about 2 billion transistors which is twice the number of transistors of the A7. 2 billion transistors is a huge number for a mobile chip. Intel’s desktop Haswell chips actually have less transistors -1.4 billion than the A8.

Despite having such number of transistors, the A8’s physical size has been reduced to a smaller size by 13% to 89 mm2. More Power is saved and according to TSMC, users should see a 15-20% improvement in both the size and power consumption when going from 28nm to 20nm.

Apple A8 Processor

Apple A8

The CPU in the A8 is 25% faster than the previous A7 design. With a 25% faster CPU on the A8 we can’t almost certainly measure an increase in core count. Instead, we are probably looking at an improved dual-core Cyclone CPU called “Cyclone 2” with a higher IPC, neither Qualcomm’s Krait nor ARM’s Cortex-A57 can compete with the resulting IPC.

The Core are clocked slightly higher up to 1.4GHz instead of the A7’s 1.3GHz. Cyclone is Apple’s 64-bit ARMv8 chip which has more similarity with desktop CPUs than something like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 processors.

The A8 uses a 64-bit memory LPDDR3-1333 RAM in the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, sixth generation iPod touch and HomePod, the A8 has 1 GB RAM included in its package, while the A8 in the iPad Mini 4 and 4th generation Apple TV is packaged with 2 GB RAM.

Apple A8 Graphics

Apple processors are known for harnessing a powerful graphic cores which renders a lot more real life image texture and smart graphical designs. The A8 chip is known to integrate a PowerVR Series 6 (Rogue) GX6450 GPU consisting of 4 clusters. Each of the clusters offers four FP16 and two FP32 ALUs, leading to a slightly higher shader performance than the former G6430 in the A7.

The core is predicted to be clocked relatively low at around 450 MHz resulting to 115 GFLOPS which helps to reduce power consumption. According to benchmark test, the GX6450 clearly outsmarts the Adreno 330 in terms of 3D performance, but performs below Nvidia’s more power hungry Tegra K1. Thus, the GX6450 is one of the fastest smartphone GPUs as of 2014 and can handle even the most demanding mobile games in high resolutions.

Benchmarks (AnTuTu)

Over at AnTuTu, specifically on the version 5, the chip reaches a low of 30877, avg of 43443.3, median of 49093 and max points of 50360.

Apple A8 Phones

• Apple iPhone 6
• Apple iPhone 6 Plus
• Apple iPad Mini 4

Apple A8 Full Specifications

Chipset Details

Series A
Codenames A8
Announced 2014
Released 2014
Number Of Cores 2-Cores
Clock Speed 1400MHz
Process Technology 20nm
CPU Dual-core 1.4GHz
Cores 2-Cores
Bit Architecture 64-bit
GPU (Graphics) PowerVR GX6450
GPU (Cores) 2-Cores
GPU (Frequency) 450MHz
Memory Speed 1333MHz
==> Disclaimer: Specifications, features shown for this chipset was inserted manually. We cannot guarantee that the info on this page is 100% correct. If you think that any information of this particular chipset is wrong or missing, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us.

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