RAM in iPhone 13 unchanged from iPhone 12 models

In gross appearance, the A15 looks just like the A14 except for one additional GPU core. Both chips are built at 5nm scale. Apple had to go with "iPhone 13" instead of "iPhone 12[s]" because the new device looks to be not any faster except on graphics. Hence, Apple didn't promote speed improvement of the iPhone 13 over the 12 and instead talked about Apple's superiority over the competition. This feels like fallout from the pandemic. While the A15 may not wow compared to the A14, Apple employees have done well to keep new products rolling.

Considering how anemic the performance increases with x86 CPU has been year over year, I'm more than happy with the big jumps that the Ax CPU's have had since they were introduced.

AppleInsider said:

The A15 processor is still a bit of a mystery in terms of computational power. Rather than comparing the A15 to the A14 during the iPhone event, Apple said the A15 has 50% more power than competitors.

The iPhone 13 lineup will be available to pre-order starting September 17 and will ship on September 24. Primary features include a smaller notch, better cameras, and high-refresh displays in the pro models.

Read on AppleInsider

Anandtech noted the following (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16934/apple-announces-iphone-13-series):

Here, they’re claiming that the new A15 will be +50% better than the next-best competitor. The next-best competitor is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 – if we look up our benchmark result set, we can see that the A14 is +41% more performant than the Snapdragon 888 in SPECint2017 – for the A15 to grow that gap to 50% it really would only need to be roughly 6% faster than the A14, which is indeed not a very large upgrade. Apple also didn’t comment on any new ISA features such as Armv9/SVE2, so it seems that the CPU doesn’t feature it?

 Apple claimed that the A15 (5 core graphics) in the new iPad Mini has a 40% faster CPU than the A12:



Last year, they also claimed the A14 CPU was 40% faster than the CPU in the A12 (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/apple-unveils-all-new-ipad-air-with-a14-bionic-apples-most-advanced-chip/):

Using breakthrough 5-nanometer process technology, A14 Bionic is packed with 11.8 billion transistors for increased performance and power efficiency in nearly every part of the chip. This latest-generation A-series chip features a new 6-core design for a 40 percent boost in CPU performance, and a new 4-core graphics architecture for a 30 percent improvement in graphics.

Now that the dust has settled, I'm pretty OK with the release.  I think the naming should have been 12s, but beyond that it's basically in line with what we expected.  5nm++ was the node, which we knew would bring refinements, but not much new performance. Sure enough, we got better battery life but not much extra oomph.  The other stuff (better cameras, Pro-motion display) was in line with expectations.  Basically everything leaked, and we got what we got.

Should be called the 12s though.

cpsro said:

In gross appearance, the A15 looks just like the A14 except for one additional GPU core. Both chips are built at 5nm scale. Apple had to go with "iPhone 13" instead of "iPhone 12[s]" because the new device looks to be not any faster except on graphics. Hence, Apple didn't promote speed improvement of the iPhone 13 over the 12 and instead talked about Apple's superiority over the competition. This feels like fallout from the pandemic. While the A15 may not wow compared to the A14, Apple employees have done well to keep new products rolling.

So by “gross appearance” you mean ignoring details? 3.2 billion additional transistors didn’t just go into an additional GPU core, it also got a higher-performance neural engine for AI and machine learning tasks and increases AI operations from last year's 11 trillion operations per second to 15.8 trillion, and a new image signal processor. That’s not nothing. Apple is clearly looking at advances in the chip from a holistic perspective versus just node process and core counts.