Apple says A10 Fusion chip is 40% faster than A9 due to two high efficiency and two high performance cores, and 6-core GPU is 50% faster than A9's GPU
Joel Hruska / ExtremeTech :
Context & Ripple Effects
With the A10 Fusion, Apple is bringing the asymmetric core design long used elsewhere in mobile into its own flagship phone silicon: two high-performance cores paired with two high-efficiency cores, plus a six-core GPU. The claim is a 40% CPU uplift over the A9 and a 50% GPU uplift.
What makes this announcement worth tracking is how durable the template proved. The A15 five years later still uses two performance cores alongside four efficiency cores, and the M5 carries six efficiency cores in a 10-core CPU — the ratio shifted, but the architecture Apple chose here became the house style.
First-order effects
- iPhone buyers get a chip whose efficiency cores handle background work at lower power, so the 40% headline speedup arrives without a proportional battery cost — the split-core design is the mechanism, not just marketing.
- Apple's 50% GPU jump puts its integrated graphics well ahead of the prior generation, raising the baseline every rival phone SoC is measured against.
Second-order effects
- Competitors' next flagships face a benchmark environment where four-core asymmetric designs are table stakes; the Geekbench numbers that followed the A11 show how quickly these generational claims get quantified and compared publicly.
- GPU vendors and game developers targeting iOS now size their work against a six-core mobile GPU, pushing more console-class rendering expectations onto phones.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and the A13 through M5 lineage suggests it does — the performance/efficiency split stops being a smartphone trick and becomes Apple's unified silicon doctrine, carried from iPhone into Mac-class chips.
- Industry-wide, this cements heterogeneous computing as the default design point for consumer processors, with marketing shifting from raw clock speeds to the balance of fast and frugal cores.
The trend: Apple's asymmetric performance-plus-efficiency core recipe, introduced with the A10 Fusion, hardened into the standard blueprint for its silicon line from iPhone through Mac.