A19 Pro’s Surprising Star Performer Are Its Four Efficiency Cores, Delivering Up To A 29 Percent Improvement At No Additional Power Draw

Apple has again maintained a 6-core CPU configuration for the A19 and A19 Pro, with two performance and four efficiency units completing the package. While it is no surprise that the more capable cores will always be responsible for the demanding tasks, the iPhone maker has made one of the most crucial changes this year, giving its efficiency cores significantly more kick than the ones present in the A18 Pro. Want to hear something even more impressive? New tests reveal that these low-power cores can deliver as much as a 29 percent performance bump while keeping the wattage level the same as last year.

The performance cores belonging to the A19 Pro do not bring as much of a difference to the table; efficiency cores become more capable thanks to massive architectural changes employed by Apple

In an earlier Geekbench 6, the A19 Pro had already impressed us by not just beating the current-generation chipset squad and cementing its position as the fastest SoC in both single-core and multi-core categories, but also touting the lowest wattage compared to every other Android flagship silicon. Now, Geekerwan’s in-depth look at the efficiency cores reveals one mammoth-sized change that Apple brought forward to the A19 Pro.

If you look at the SPEC 2017 benchmark, which exclusively focuses on integer and floating-point performance, the efficiency cores belonging to the A19 and A19 Pro are running at 2.60GHz, making it a small increase over the A18 Pro’s 2.42GHz clock speeds. Now, here is the best part, as the YouTuber points out, compared to Apple’s last year’s flagship A-series silicon, the A19 Pro registers an impressive 29 percent improvement in integer performance and a 22 percent increase in floating-point performance.

These improvements were recorded with zero change to the power consumption between the A19 Pro and A18 Pro, which is nothing short of a magic trick. If we compare instructions per cycle (IPC) improvements, there is a 21 percent difference between the two chipset classes in integer performance and a 14 percent improvement in floating-point performance. If you think Apple has resorted to some technological ‘voodoo’ to make this possible, we have discussed below the architectural changes the company made to its efficiency cores.

Apple has used an entirely different efficiency core design for the A19 Pro, resulting in a major performance uplift at practically zero increase in power consumption

If you look at the A18 Pro’s and A19 Pro’s efficiency core diagram below, which was illustrated by the YouTuber, you can spot various changes, such as increasing the front-end decoding units from five widths to six widths. The Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs), which are considered to be the mathematical brain of the CPU, have increased from three units on the A18 Pro to four on the A19 Pro.

Apple has also improved the scheduler depth on the floating-point, and in case you did not notice, the integer and floating-point physical registers are combined into a single unit, reducing the amount of latency, leading to increased operations as a result of faster communication between the two components. A19 Pro’s efficiency cores also appear larger than A18 Pro’s, which is not surprising to learn, given all the additions made.

This is truly a remarkable accomplishment from Apple’s side and shows how many levels there are to chip engineering. Another impressive feat of the A19 Pro is that, where its competitors are forced to increase the number of cores to boast the same performance levels, the chipset delivers the same result with fewer.

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