iPhone 14 Pro: Apple had to backtrack on GPU specs

The engineers Apple would they have been too greedy regarding the GPU of the processor A16 of the’iPhone 14 Pro ? According to the site The Information, the team in charge of the Ax and Mx SoCs would have been much too ambitious concerning certain characteristics of the GPU integrated into the SoC A16 (it was initially planned that this GPU manage the ray tracing calculations natively). An advanced prototype of the A16 equipped with this new ultra-powerful GPU turned out to be far too power-hungry, but Apple didn’t realize this problem until already late in the development cycle.

Knowing that there was not enough time left before the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple would then have decided in a hurry to place in the A16 a GPU with an architecture almost identical to that of the A15 GPU. This would explain why the difference in GPU performance is actually minimal between the A15 and the A16.

Also according to the Information, this prototyping incident, unprecedented for Apple, would be due to the large restructuring of the team in charge of graphics chips. Several managers and project leaders would have been removed from the project (or would have left the company), including key elements who had contributed to Apple’s dominance in the mobile chip sector.