Apple last month held its annual September ‘Time Flies’ event during which they announced the all new 4th Generation iPad Air with an all new Apple A14 Bionic. A14 Bionic is now also found in the latest iPhone 12 series. Apple claims that it is the fastest chip in a smartphone & early adopters of these new products agree with this claim. Based on a 5nm and 6 core little architecture, A14 is not only the fastest but also has the smallest transistor size in any smartphone (and desktop) chip in the world.
Following the launch of the iPad Air and the iPhone 12 many suspected iPad Pro will get a refresh with a brand new A14X chip to be based on the same architecture but with 2 extra cores. We finally have a confirmation courtesy of China Times. Their report indicates that Apple is not only planning an A14X but also a Mac-specific A14T and an Apple discrete GPU.
A14X and T versions are supposed to be based on the same 5nm design with minor tweaks. If we see previous trends, A14X should have 2 extra High performance cores alongside the already 6 core cpu. A14X should also have an 8-Core GPU based on the same trends. This should give a major boost over the old A12X and A12Z CPUs currently in the iPad Pro.
The point of interest is the A14T chipset. This new ‘T’ line has never been heard before via Apple or via any other news source. China Times says that this new A14T will debut only on early 2021 iMacs. This might be due to the power limits being unlocked on an A14X or a different CPU overall. Personally, I take this claim with a grain of salt. A14X on an iPad and a MacBook Pro does not make sense. In recent history we have seen that the X series does not beat MacBook Pro performance (16-inch MacBook Pro). However we do not know either of these speculations for sure yet.
The report also mentions a new Apple GPU to debut on an iMac as well. This is unheard of since Apple does not make discrete GPUs. There are certain internal codenames for these new projects mentioned in this report which are derived from international languages.
Apple Silicon event is expected to take place on November 17th according to previous rumours and reports.
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Author: Hitarth Dixit
Consumer technology enthusiast. Writer at Appleosophy.
