This denotes how important TSMC and having the fabrication node advantage is for Apple. The A15 seems to be an all-around good chip, just not the magnitude of performance jumps (20%+) Apple has shown since the A7. For reference, this chip is on an improved TSMC 5nm (N5P) node but still 5nm nonetheless like last year's A14.
Last year's M1/A14 cores had performance gains due to the combined architecture improvement and the shifting from TSMC 7nm to 5nm fabrication. At the time it was difficult to determine the % of gains attributable to either, so now it seems we have a better idea that node advantage could be the majority.
It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next M-series chip announcement, e.g. M1X or M2. I still think it's plausible Apple switches the M-series chips to 3nm first in order to cement their superiority over Intel. That said, porting architectures across nodes is no small feat (as we saw in Intel's Rocket Lake, though that was small -> big).
Last year's M1/A14 cores had performance gains due to the combined architecture improvement and the shifting from TSMC 7nm to 5nm fabrication. At the time it was difficult to determine the % of gains attributable to either, so now it seems we have a better idea that node advantage could be the majority.
It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next M-series chip announcement, e.g. M1X or M2. I still think it's plausible Apple switches the M-series chips to 3nm first in order to cement their superiority over Intel. That said, porting architectures across nodes is no small feat (as we saw in Intel's Rocket Lake, though that was small -> big).