While it's obvious that the A16 Bionic could easily run a computer from just a few years ago, including some of the best MacBook and Macs that were running some of the best Intel processors of the era, the performance gains on Apple's MacBook and iMac lineups will accelerate ahead of its mobile chips in terms of performance gains gen-on-gen.Īs powerful as the A16 Bionic might be, it would struggle to run a MacBook Air, though it might be able to do so, in theory, with some constraints thrown on it. Phone processors will hit a wall long before MacBook chips will The latter was able to physically grow into the larger M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, where transistor density has a much more greater impact effect on performance. So while the A16 Bionic looks to be plenty powerful, there is literally only so much space it has to grow, unlike Apple's M-series chips, so any gains in performance the A16 Bionic can squeeze out is really limited to the effectively smaller transistor size of the 4nm node compared to the 5nm node used in the A15 Bionic and especially something like the Apple M1 chip. This is where the issue of transistor density is going to really come into play, since as we've seen with the M1 Pro, M1 Max, and especially the M1 Ultra, utilizing the physical space you have to acheive gains in performance is a major asset for these desktop and laptop chips. This means that next-gen phone processors are still going to lag behind desktop and laptop processors, and that this gap is only likely to widen going forward because they have to be physically smaller to fit in a phone or tablet. Given these kinds of constraints, what the A16 Bionic is likely to achieve in terms of performance is fantastic, but it is still running into the limits of transistor density much harder than desktop chips are likely to do for a while yet. And while desktop processors especially will have more room to physically grow in size – much more so than laptop processors and definitely more than those in phones and tablets – we're really at the point where the physical constraints of die size are what determine a processor's potential power, rather than some remarkably smaller transistor on a desktop product. That hard cap is set by physics, really, since transistors are already working on truly atomic scales as it is. The other thing to consider when it comes to the Apple A16 Bionic and the Apple M2 chips is that there is still a physical limit to how many transistors you will ultimately be able to fit on either.
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