The iPhone 14 Pro is, according to our benchmarks, the fastest smartphone you can buy. But, if The Information’s sources are to be believed, it could have been even better, with support for ray tracing.
According to the report, the plan was for the A16 Bionic chip powering the iPhone 14 Pro to offer a “generational leap” for the GPU, including support for ray tracing, but Apple’s engineers were “too ambitious with adding new features.”
This, the report claims, is why the increase in performance between the iPhone 13 and iPhone 14 Pro is on the incremental side. Potential issues were only uncovered “late in development” meaning chip design had to closely mimic that of the previous generation — and the one that ended up in the non-Pro iPhone 14.
It was a mistake that was, apparently, “unprecedented in the [Apple Silicon] group’s history,” and it may go some way to explaining why Apple was relatively muted when promoting generational performance gains at its September event. Typically, the company bedazzles with numbers when talking about speed improvements, but this time around we got a sole mention of improvements to memory bandwidth.
The talent drain was apparently so bad, that Apple reportedly tried to put people off leaving by preparing presentations demonstrating that most chip startups fail. You can read the whole piece at The Information.
