Apple A10 Fusion Chip Is Far Bigger than Its Competition

Apple’s A10 Fusion chipset is the first time that the company has introduced a total of four processing cores. Two of them are power cores, while the remaining two are efficient cores, similar to ARM’s Cortex-A53. The latest Chipworks teardown managed to compare the different cores sizes and what we’ve seen so far is that Apple really loves to design big cores, which have their own natural advantages, which we’ll get to in a while.

If you take a look at the power cores, which Apple has named them the ‘Hurricane’ cores, these will be responsible for taking care of those tasks which are considered to stress the processor a lot. This core is a lot bigger than Qualcomm’s Kryo, Samsung’s M1 and ARM’s Cortex-A72. Apart from Qualcomm’s Kryo processor core, Apple’s Hurricane is twice the size of the remaining. As for the energy efficient cores, which have been codenamed ‘Zephyr’, this too is bigger than Cortex-A53. Now one reason why Apple keenly develops larger cores compared to the competition is because they equal better speed and efficiency.

Large processing cores will equal a higher number of transistors, which will automatically result in higher efficiency and better firepower. In all the benchmarks that you’ve seen till now, none of the chipsets present in Android flagship smartphones are able to get the better of Apple’s A10 Fusion. Even Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821, which is said to feature its Kryo cores running at a higher speed than the cores present in Snapdragon 820 lags behind the custom-designed chipset belonging to the tech giant.

Even when Apple’s iPhone 7 took on a Galaxy Note 7 in a speed test, the iPhone 7 gained a comprehensive lead against the phablet even though you could say that the Galaxy Note 7’s QHD resolution put more stress on the processor, which is actually true. Regardless, Apple designing its own cores has given the company a huge performance lead over the competition.