Why Apple's A12 and A12x Bionic Chips Trounce The Competition

With Apple's release of the A12 and A12x Bionic chips, Apple may have changed the mobile playing field and the stadium.

This September at Apple’s annual “Special Event” for 2018, they unveiled this year’s line of new mobile devices in the iPhone Xs, Xs Max and Xr. During the keynote, as always, they covered the essential components that highlight this new round of iOS mobile phones. Despite most of the gaping wows from the crowd coming in response to the features housed in the new 12 mega-pixel camera offered in the iPhone Xs nd Xs Max, the bigger news unbeknown to most was the advent of Apple’s new A12 Bionic CPU chipset powering this next round of Apple mobile devices.¹

Bundled with a hefty 6-core CPU, a powerhouse 4-core GPU, and an updated Machine Learning Nueral Engine; the A12 Bionic technical specs definitely live up to Apple’s claim of the A12 being “the smartest and most powerful chip ever in a smartphone.” The event itself did a good job of highlighting key performance increases built into this new chip. The A12 boasts computation power of 5 trillion operations per second. It yields Machine Learning tasks nearly nine times faster, up to 50% lower power usage, and a 3D graphics rendering processor claiming to provide 50% higher performance over last year’s A11 GPU.

Hold on, time out… Let’s not get too extreme here.

However, the benchmarks are in. The numbers are real. Countless articles are surfacing across the internet advertising the sheer horsepower packed into this tiny new mobile CPU. The A12 just completely dominates over the next best mobile processor on the market, the Qualcomm SnapDragon 945, which currently powers Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and Google’s soon to be released Pixel 3 mobile phone. In tests the A12 has shown to be nearly twice as fast in multi-threading proficiency and computation operations. And if that wasn’t enough, in October at Apple’s next special event they announced the next set of iPad Pro models powered by an even beefier version of the A12 chip… the A12X Bionic.

The A12X Bionic houses an octa-core CPU (8-core CPU), a 7-core GPU with 3D rendering that Apple characterizes as “Xbox One S-class graphics performance”.

But What Does All This Mean To The Normal User?

Well, the long of it is within a mobile device you gain a snappy user-interface and a faster phone/tablet with a very responsive feel. The short of it… The A12 chipset has set the bar substantially high for the next-level of processing prowess required for all mobile devices going forward.

As the world eagerly expands and embraces new technologies in AI, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Image Recognition, Virtual Reality and IoT; heavier computation power and graphics potential housed within smaller form factors are needed to power the next round of consumer and industrial devices and products.

Just understand this simple concept: the A12 and A12X mobile CPUs — by themselves — are more powerful with better graphics than the standard 13-inch 2016 Mac Book Pro you’re probably using to read this article. The capabilities housed in these new chips are countless. It places the full capacity of modern software at your finger tips housed within a device that is just a fraction of the size of your current computer hardware.

Nothing in the consumer market is even close this level of computing power at this size. I know it’s got me excited, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

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