Apple A12


The Apple A12 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip designed by Apple Inc. It first appeared in the iPhone XS, XS Max, XR and 2019 versions of the iPad Air and iPad Mini. Apple states that the two high-performance cores are 15% faster and 50% more energy-efficient than the Apple A11's, and the four high-efficiency cores use 50% less power than the A11's. It is the first, mass-market system on a chip to be built on the 7nm node.

Design

The Apple A12 SoC features an Apple-designed 64-bit ARMv8.3-A six-core CPU, with two high-performance cores running at 2.49 GHz called Vortex and four energy-efficient cores called Tempest. The Vortex cores are a 7-wide decode out-of-order superscalar design, while the Tempest cores are a 3-wide decode out-of-order superscalar design. Like the Mistral cores, the Tempest cores are based on Apple's Swift cores from the Apple A6.
The A12 also integrates an Apple-designed four-core graphics processing unit with 50% faster graphics performance than the A11. The A12 includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Next-generation Neural Engine." This neural network hardware has eight cores and can perform up to 5 trillion 8-bit operations per second. Unlike the A11's Neural Engine, third party apps can access the A12's Neural Engine.
The A12 is manufactured by TSMC using a 7 nm FinFET process, the first to ship in a consumer product, and it contains 6.9 billion transistors. The die size of the A12 is 83.27 mm2, 5% smaller than the A11. It is manufactured in a package on package together with 4 GiB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone XS and XS Max and 3 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone XR, the iPad Air, and the 5th generation iPad mini. The ARMv8.3 instruction set it supports brings a significant security improvement in the form of pointer authentication, which mitigates exploitation techniques such as those involving memory corruption, Jump-Oriented-Programming, and Return-Oriented-Programming.
SoCA12 A11
Total Die83.2787.66
Big Core2.072.68
Small Core0.430.53
CPU Complex 11.9014.48
GPU Core3.234.43
GPU Total14.8815.28
NPU5.791.83

Products that include the Apple A12 Bionic