Apple’s Bionic A12 Chip: Facts and Fiction Separated

From day one, there has been strong competition between mobile phone manufacturers as the need to remain relevant is a necessity. Over the past few years, these manufacturers have sort out ways to improve the overall performance of their smartphone devices. One way they have improved performance is by going the extra mile to build more powerful processor into their smartphones.

Not everyone is aware of the fact that Samsung is Apple’s strongest competitor; well a healthy competition is not bad at all especially when it favors the users.

When an individual’s brain is retarded it is impossible for the person to act normal, in the same light, the processor is the brain of the smartphone. A phone whose processor is not powerful will show lag while running and this is not appealing to users.

Apple is a brand known for building most of its chipset or processors, we saw how good Apple’s A11 bionic was and users were impressed. However, Apple did not relent as they have built a stronger chipset that has been incorporated in recent Apple flagship phones. 

The A12 bionic built-in iPhone X, XR, XS and XS Max made a lot of wave as it now holds its ground in the face of processors found in notebooks and computers. Another strong competitor Qualcomm also built the Snapdragon 845 and 835 processor which are also powerful processor that can match up to the Apple’s A12 bionic.

However, benchmarking and examination done by Anantech compares the A12 bionic with some equally powerful processors like the Samsung’s exynos 9810 and 8895 and Qualcomm’s snapdragon 845 and 835 processor.

The industry standard benchmark “SPEC2016” is found in all the processors and is said to use a larger and more complex data set. Furthermore, benchmark examination is usually done because it can ascertain the microarchitecture of the memory subsystem performance.

The benchmark also gives estimates due to the fact that it is not validated by spec. By the way, it is the first time in over two years that the SPEC2016 is uses on IOS device.

Apple says the A12 bionic is its first ever 7nm chip and has been term the most powerful chip ever featured in a smartphone. However, following the trend months later Huawei released its 7nm kirin 980 processor.

Even though the hyped A12 bionic seem to be the future of new and better processors, most users are not excited and this is probably because the previous chipset from Apple was also hyped but didn’t turn out to be what users expected.

Well, I can’t say how great the overly hyped A12 bionic is but one fact I am sure of is that it is nine times faster than its predecessor. The A12 bionic is also built with Al technology that makes it possible for iPhone X, XR, XS and XS Max to carry out some tasks.

One of those tasks is that carried out by the home court app which allows users to play basketball while recording the number of shots and passes they make and miss.

Comparing A12 bionic and other processor

Comparing processors is made possible by the use of benchmarking, although this will only give estimates, the stronger processor can still be ascertained. Examination carried out on Apple’s A12 bionic and the A11 bionic shows that the former is 5% higher in majority of workload.

When a SPECint2006 was carried out, the result showed a 24% increase in performance while other test conducting showed an increase from 30 to 42 percent.

In terms of power efficiency, A12 bagged an amazing 12% increase to the performance of the A11 bionic. When the SPECfc2006 test was conducted, A12 had a 28% increase while in the 433.milc test it rose to 75%.

The Apples A12 bionic was built two performance cores and four efficiency cores making it about 50% more efficient than the A11 bionic. Also, the chipset comes with an updated neutral engine that carries out the Al task effectively.

Unlike the A11 bionic that came with two core neutral engine, the A12 has an eight-core neutral engine. While that of the old chip could carry out 6 billion operations per second, the A12 can carry out 5 trillion operations per second.

Interestingly, the 470 ibm test showed the multifactorial advantage over ARM and Samsung’s core. Furthermore, the test was able to prove that the A12 microarchitecture is able to optimize by having a lower instruction loop buffer.

This loop buffer allows the core bypass the coding stage in a loop iteration while getting instructions from the buffer.

While conducting the SPEC2006 benchmark test, the performance of the A12 chip was compared to that of a desktop processor. Amazingly, the A12 bionic processor outperformed the skylake based chip found in desktops.

The performance difference though insignificant, it is still interesting to see a phone’s processor outperform a desktop processor.

A similar test was also carried out by winter charm to compare Apple’s latest chipset with Intel’s Xeon 8176 and core i7-6700k and also the AMDs EPYC 7601.

After the SPEC2006 test, winter charm in a redditor post says that the A12 bionic supersedes the other chips in terms of performance. Also, the performance also has a lower clock speed with lower energy consumption.

He further explained that the A12 bionic offered other advantage which includes a favorable design that contributes to higher number if instructions per seconds. Winter charm concluded by saying ” the A12 bionic almost caught up to x86 desktops and server CPUs.

The A12 bionic processor is the real deal presently but there are speculations that competitors are already building a Windows 10 machine based on ARM chip from Qualcomm.

Predicting the future, redditor says the A12 bionic might scale through the next two generation and users can expect to see the ARM max on smartphones three years from now.