Apple’s A12 Chip: The Breakdown

Apple has announced 3 new iphone at their sept gather round event. Each of these new phones is sport a new processor, Apple’s A12. Apple says “the A12 is a whole new level of intelligence. The A12 Bionic, with our next-generation Neural Engine, delivers incredible performance. It uses real-time machine learning to transform the way you experience photos, gaming, augmented reality, and more.” Lets dive in a find out what we have in store with this next gen processor.

The scoop from the conference on these blazingly revolutionary chips is looking super hot. They said that under the hood, the new iPhone XS models pack Apple’s A12 Bionic CPU, the first commercially available 7nm chip. The processor, which comprises of a four-core CPU, six-core GPU a next-gen eight-core neural engine, promises to deliver a 15 per cent performance boost compared to last year’s A11 chip, 40 per cent lower power consumption and support for real-time machine learning.

Apple’s A12 Bionic and Real Time Machine Learning

What does that mean real time machine learning… In short It can now handle five trillion operations per second, which is a bloody massive hike on the A11 Bionic’s mere 600 billion. Of course, such numbers are meaningless to all but the most dedicated chip nerds, but it has lead to Apple claiming that Apple’s A12 Bionic is the “smartest” smartphone chip ever.

Having such machine learning performance on a device rather than requiring a connection back to a central or cloud-based system could be the motivation to get developers making more apps with AI-capabilities, especially as there are plenty of kits and frameworks to make the integration of machine learning a much easier process

Apple’s A12 Bionic chip follows the 7nm fabrication process. The previous A11 Bionic and Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 845 CPUs both use 10nm processes. Generally speaking, smaller nodes means you can fit more components onto the same physical space, allowing for faster, more powerful processors.

Apple’s A12 Bionic key features

• CPU: Six cores
• GPU: Four cores
• Neural engine: Eight cores
• Storage support: Up to 512GB addressable storage
• Fabrication node: 7nm

The Final Thought

A Lot of this is gargon and way over our heads. Apple has a nice way of explaining it to the leigh person.  Apple says that this means apps will launch apps launch up to 30% faster than they would on an A11-powered iPhone, and overall performance is 50% faster.