Apple A16 Bionic vs Apple M2: What’s the difference?

Apple has just unveiled its latest and greatest smartphone chip: the Apple A16 Bionic.

But how does it compare to the latest MacBook processor? We decided to compare the specifications of the Apple A16 Bionic and Apple M2 chips right here.

So, here are all the main differences between the two Apple chips.

A16 Bionic is designed for iPhone.

The first difference is the most important, as the A16 Bionic and M2 were designed for completely different devices. A16 Bionic is only available inside the iPhone. For now, this only includes the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Meanwhile, the M2 chip is currently only available in the latest MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. It is highly likely that the processor will also be available for iMac, Mac Mini and iPad in the future. However, it will almost certainly not be available for any iPhone.

A16 Bionic has a 4nm architecture.

Processor manufacturers are always striving to create smaller technology nodes in order to provide higher performance. A great example of this is the Apple A16 Bionic with its revolutionary 4nm architecture, which is an upgrade from the 5nm architecture used in the older A15 Bionic.

The Apple M2 uses a 5nm architecture that lacks the 4nm A16 Bionic process node. But don’t confuse the A16 Bionic with a more powerful processor, as we’ll explain in the next article.

M2 has more transistors

The smaller technology node usually allows processor manufacturers to cram more transistors into the chip, but it’s important to remember that the M2 is significantly larger than the A16 Bionic since it’s designed for larger devices.

As a result, M2 contains an impressive 20 billion transistors. In comparison, the Apple A16 Bionic processor contains only 16 billion transistors. Generally, the more transistors, the better the performance. As you might expect, the M2 chip is a more powerful processor than the A16 Bionic.

The A16 is more focused on battery life.

The Apple A16 Bionic has a 6-core processor, while the M2 has an 8-core one. On paper, it doesn’t seem like much of a difference. But once you delve into the specs, you’ll see that the A16 Bionic is more optimized in terms of power consumption than performance.

The A16 CPU consists of 2 high performance cores and 4 high performance cores. In comparison, the M2 CPU has 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.

The balance of these two types of processor cores shows where Apple’s priority is for each chip. The A16 Bionic is more focused on extending battery life, while the M2 values ​​performance as much as endurance. This isn’t surprising, since battery life is perhaps more important than processing speed when it comes to smartphones, while high speed is valued more on laptops.

M2 has a more powerful GPU

Apple has confirmed that the A16 Bionic will feature a 5-core GPU just like its predecessor. This pales in comparison to Apple’s 10-core M2 GPU, which uses twice as many cores.

This means that the M2 chip is much better suited for graphics-intensive workloads such as photo editing and video editing, which is no surprise given that this chip is designed for laptops.