Apple says A19 chip in new Apple TV 4K is up to 2x faster

The A19 chip in the new Apple TV 4K (4th Gen) represents a multi-generational leap over the A15 Bionic in the Apple TV 4K (3rd Gen), for better responsiveness and gaming graphics.

Apple is still not positioning Apple TV 4K as a rival to PlayStation or Xbox, but it is increasingly highlighting gaming as a key benefit of the media box's more powerful hardware.

The new Apple TV 4K (4th Gen) now features the A19 chip, which also powers iPhone 17. While it is not the Pro variant of the chip, A19 is still a very capable chip, manufactured using a more advanced and efficient 3nm process compared with the 5nm process used for A15 Bionic in the previous Apple TV 4K (3rd Gen).

A19 normally features six CPU cores, five GPU cores and 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM – double the 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM in A15 Bionic. The newer memory also offers twice the memory bandwidth. A19 further adds hardware-accelerated ray tracing and Neural Accelerators, alongside a 16-core Neural Engine.


Up to 2x faster graphics
Apple announced the new Apple TV 4K (4th Gen) with the following performance claims:

- "The A19 chip in the new Apple TV 4K delivers up to 50 percent faster CPU performance and up to 2x faster GPU performance than the previous generation, for greater responsiveness, faster navigation, and smoother animations. The A19 chip also includes a new, dedicated AV1 decoder, enabling more efficient, high-quality streaming while using less bandwidth."

Apple says it measured gaming frame rates on a 4K TV using NBA 2K26 Arcade Edition v1.5 with the ultra high quality preset.

While Apple's claims broadly align with A19 versus A15 Bionic benchmarks on iPhone, several factors can affect performance on Apple TV. Flatpanels will examine these in our upcoming in-depth review.

On paper, A19 should be capable of running many console games, although not at the same high resolutions and frame rates as the most powerful game consoles. Apple's Metal graphics technology can leverage features such as AI upscaling and frame generation.

The bigger challenge is getting game developers to bring console games to tvOS and Apple TV 4K. Apple made no announcements during its 'Welcome Home' event to suggest a major breakthrough in this area, still focusing primarily on Apple Arcade games.


Built-in security and privacy
In addition to its significantly faster CPU and GPU, A19 also incorporates advanced security and privacy protections, as highlighted by Apple.

- "Apple TV 4K and the A19 chip include Secure Exclaves: protected and compartmentalized runtimes used to process microphone data separately from the rest of the system," said Apple. "Data that is processed and analyzed in the Secure Exclaves cannot be accessed by tvOS, apps, the user, or Apple."

- "Siri requests on Apple TV 4K can use on-device processing or Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy of the device to the cloud. When processed in Private Cloud Compute, data is neither stored nor made accessible to Apple or anyone else."