AMD PRO A A8 A8 PRO-7150B 

The GPU even received a bit of a bump, too.

It is now clocked at 757 MHz versus the previous generation's 720 MHz with all else equal, as far as I can tell.

Thanks to this smaller node Apple has been able to build in additional features to the SoC while simultaneously shaving off around 15% of their die size.

Meanwhile based on this die shot Chipworks believes that the L2 cache has been reorganized to a per-core design, as there is no obvious single block of L2 on A8 like there was A7.

So one of the first benchmarks for Apple's A8 SoC has been published to Rightware, and it is not very different from its predecessor.

The Apple A7 GPU of last year's iPhone 5S received a score of 20,253.80 on the Basemark X synthetic benchmark.

If you recall from last year, Cyclone is Apple’s 64-bit ARMv8 chip; it’s a superscalar beast that has more in common with desktop CPUs than something like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.

The 50% faster GPU performance is probably something as simple as more cores.