The latest Apple TV 4K has been available to consumers for just about a week, and we continue to learn more about the changes and improvements Apple’s made with this year’s revision. The new Apple TV 4K is powered by the A15 Bionic chip, and new in-depth testing from FlatpanelsHD offers an interesting look at how this compares to game consoles like the Playstation 4 and Playstation 5.

Apple TV 4K performance testing

The A15 chip used by this year’s Apple TV 4K has a 4-core GPU, rather than the 5-core GPU version that was used in the iPhone 13 Pro. It also has a 4-core CPU rather than a 5-core CPU, again showing that it’s basically a “binned” version of the A15 Bionic chip used in other devices.

In terms of performance compared to the previous-generation Apple TV with an A12 chip inside, the tests done by FlatpanelsHD show that this year’s Apple TV 4K is “roughly 40% faster.” Apple advertises that it should be 50% faster, but this difference could simply come down to differences in testing methodology.

Another change this year is that the latest Apple TV 4K doesn’t have a fan inside, leading to a smaller and lighter design. How does this impact performance, cooling, and throttling? The new Apple TV 4K actually throttles less than the previous model:

In our CPU benchmark testing A15 was roughly 40% faster than A12 in the previous Apple TV – short of Apple’s claimed 50% improvement that may use different testing methodology. On the other…