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Apple a8 vs a9

superpetro1

Junior Member
Ok, so I was curious as to how much the advantage is that the a9 architecture has over the a8 architecture. So I checked to see what would happen if the a8 was fabricated on the 16nm/14nm process with lpddr4 memory. I did some rough math to check:

Info I know:
-Samsung stated that their 14nm process would have a 20% increase in performance compared to leading 20nm architectures. This would be due to the finfet properties of the chips which would reduce leakage.
-the clock speed gain over the a8 is 1.23x (compared to iPad mini 4 at 1.5ghz)

So I did this test using geekbench 3. The iPhone SE had a score of 2556 single core and 4444 multi-core.
It's subscores were as follows (integer, FP, memory)
Single-core:
-2548
-2523
-2638

The a8 was as follows:
Total: 1719 single and 3118 multi
Single-core subscores:
-1819
-1699
-1562 (ignore this)


Geekbench weights the scores
Integer is 40%
FP is 40%
Memory is 20%

Also, I dropped the a8 memory subscore in favor of the a9 memory subscore, as a shrink in a8 would also probably bring ddr4 support with the new generation.

My math is as follows:

1.23*1.2(1819(.4)+1699(.4))+2638(.2)=2596.18

Basically exactly the a9 single core score.

Would a shrunken a8 core with ddr4 be basically as fast as an a9 core?
 
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