Apple A15

The Apple A15 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip designed by Apple Inc. It is used in the iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, and the 2021 iPad Mini. Apple made no claims of increased performance from its predecessor SoC. PhoneArena reported the test results from the independent test benches of Anandtech and the numbers were surprising. 

This benchmark test revealed that A15 is not just 50% faster than the competition (as Apple itself stated during the official presentation), but a whopping 62% faster than the best Qualcomm competitor. The A15 contains 15 billion transistors and includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a new 16-core Neural Engine. The Neural Engine can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, faster than A14's 11 trillion operations per second (+ 43%). It is reckoned that the A15's performance cores improved energy efficiency by 17% on its peak performance versus the A14."Compared to the competition, the A15 isn't 50% faster as Apple claims, but rather 62% faster," the report reasons. 

The Apple M1 has 8 CPU cores, with 4 high-performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores. This tells us that Apple is clearly prioritizing battery life for any device with an A15 chip, while the M1 tries to hit an equal balance for both performance and battery life.