iPhone 13: the RAM does not change compared to the iPhone 12, the performance of the A15 Bionic does

A short distance from the presentation of the new line of iPhone comes the insights on the aspects of the data sheet that Apple usually does not communicate. The first inevitable step is to establish the amount of integrated RAM memory and to provide it, as often happens, is Xcode (the software development environment for Apple platforms). Then we move on to quantify the increase in performance guaranteed by the new SoC. From the data that has emerged in the last few hours it can be summarized that: the RAM of the new iPhone 13 does not change compared to the iPhone 12, but the performance of the A15 Bionic does, especially considering the GPU of the Pro models.

To reveal how much RAM is in the body of the iPhone 13, 13 mini, 13 Pro and Pro Max is the beta version of Xcode 13:

This year, therefore, Apple made a more conservative choice compared to that of 2020: the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max had in fact gained 2GB of RAM compared to the corresponding models (Pro) of the end of 2019, going from 4GB to 6GB of RAM; the non-Pro models, on the other hand, had remained anchored to the 4GB of RAM.

It's a different matter regarding the performance of the new Apple A15 Bionic SoC which, according to the first benchmark results, seems to bring with it an important improvement in performance. During the presentation, Apple compared the increase in computing power in percentage terms with respect to a generic competition (up to 50% more for the CPU: up to 50% more for the GPU of the Pro models and 30% of the not Pro). The first results of Geekbench instead allow us to outline a first comparison between the two latest generations of Apple chips.

Chapter CPU: sharing the same unit, with the same number of cores (6), the results between iPhone 13 Pro and non-Pro are aligned in Geekbench 5 tests. The result is about 1,725 ​​points in single core and 4,600 points in multi-core. Compared to the CPU of the A14 Bionic the performance increase is about 10% and 18% respectively.

But it is the GPU sector that shows the most significant step forward. iPhone 13 Pro (also identified as iPhone 14.2) gets a Metal Score of 14.216 in Geekbench 5, i.e. +55% performance compared to iPhone 12 Pro.

The analogous test carried out with the iPhone 13 (iPhone 14.5) returns a lower result, equal to 10,608 (Metal Score) which is still higher by about 15% compared to the iPhone 12 score. The performance gap between the iPhone 13 Pro and non-Pro shouldn't be surprising given that Apple has specified that the GPU of the former is based on a 5-core architecture, which are reduced to 4 in the non-Pro GPU.