Apple’s A16 Bionic GPU was said to be even more capable than the commercial unit powering the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. Unfortunately, one report claims that the company’s engineers did not foresee some problems, which led to an earlier prototype with ray tracing support getting scrapped.
Previous A16 Bionic saw massive power draw, resulting in abysmal battery life and eventual thermal throttling
Despite the A16 Bionic GPU gaining around a 28 percent performance improvement over the unit in the A15 Bionic in AnTuTu, an earlier version could have been miles better, according to The Information. MacRumors reports Apple’s engineers wanted to incorporate several features into the graphics processor, including ray tracing support, which would have increased visuals immensely in mobile games that support the option.
Unfortunately, in their quest to make the most capable GPU in an iPhone ever, the engineers ran into some massive obstacles. Like every other smartphone, an iPhone requires a battery to run and needs an efficient SoC not only to provide extended screen-on time but also to manage heat dissipation effectively.
While ray tracing support would have been a nice touch, it would have been at the cost of a massive power draw, increasing temperatures, and guzzling battery life. Going back to the drawing board, Apple’s engineers had to make another prototype that would differ itself from the A15 Bionic while also providing some notable improvements to the A16 Bionic.
These problems forced Apple to eventually restructure its entire graphics processor team, meaning that some managers had to be removed from the A16 Bionic’s development to work on something else. Naturally, this may not have been met properly by the company’s staff, which may have been the reason for their departure. Over the years, Apple has lost some key figures that were essential to the company’s dominance in the smartphone SoC space.
This was evident when the A15 Bionic from last year did not deliver a massive performance gain over the A14 Bionic, and now, history appears to have repeated itself. Though the A16 Bionic is still the fastest smartphone SoC at this time, the loss of important talent will allow the likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek to capitalize on this opportunity. So far, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has not been able to beat the A16 Bionic in single-core and multi-core results, but the performance gap has reduced significantly.
This can mean we may not experience any massive power efficiency and performance gains when the A17 Bionic launches next year, but let us not get too ahead of ourselves.
News Source: The Information
