The Apple A12 Bionic is a

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

ARM-based

system on a chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or Electronics, electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with computer memory, ...

(SoC) designed by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

, part of the

Apple silicon Apple silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture family, ARM architecture. They are used in nearly all of the company's devices including Mac ...

series, It first appeared in the iPhone XS and XS Max,

iPhone XR The iPhone XR is a smartphone developed and marketed by Apple Inc. It is part of the twelfth generation of the iPhone, alongside the higher-end iPhone XS/XS Max models. Pre-orders began on October 19, 2018, with the official release on Octo ...

iPad Air (3rd generation) The iPad Air (3rd generation) (colloquially referred to as iPad Air 3) is a tablet computer developed and marketed by Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, C ...

iPad Mini (5th generation) The fifth-generation iPad Mini (stylized and marketed as iPad mini and colloquially referred to as iPad Mini 5) is a tablet computer in the iPad Mini line, developed and marketed by Apple Inc. Announced in a press release along with the IPad A ...

, iPad (8th generation) and Apple TV 4K (2nd generation). Apple states that the two high-performance cores are 15% faster and 40% more energy-efficient than the

Apple A11 The Apple A11 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series, and manufactured by TSMC. It was only used in the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and iPhone X which were introduced on Septemb ...

'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 using the 7 nm process. Updates for the 8th generation iPad and the 3rd generation iPad Pro will still be supported.

Design

The Apple A12 SoC features an Apple-designed 64-bit

ARMv8.3-A AArch64, also known as ARM64, is a 64-bit version of the ARM architecture family, a widely used set of computer processor designs. It was introduced in 2011 with the ARMv8 architecture and later became part of the ARMv9 series. AArch64 allows pr ...

six-core CPU, with two high-performance cores called Vortex, running at 2.49 GHz, and four energy-efficient cores called Tempest. The Vortex cores are a 7-wide decode out-of-order

superscalar A superscalar processor (or multiple-issue processor) is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single in ...

design, while the Tempest cores are a 3-wide decode out-of-order superscalar design. Like the A11's Mistral cores, the Tempest cores are based on Apple's Swift cores from the

Apple A6 The Apple A6 is a 32-bit package on package (PoP) system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series. It was introduced on September 12, 2012, at the launch of the iPhone 5. Apple states that it is up to twice as fast ...

. The A12 also integrates an Apple-designed four-core

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

(GPU) 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 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...

using a

7 nm In semiconductor manufacturing, the "7 nm" process is a term for the MOSFET technology node following the 10 nm process, "10 nm" node, defined by the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), which was preceded by the International T ...

FinFET A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the chann ...

process, the first to ship in a consumer product, containing 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 Package on a package (PoP) is an integrated circuit packaging method to vertically combine ball grid array (BGA) packages for discrete logic and Semiconductor memory, memory. Two or more packages are installed atop each other, i.e. stacked, with a ...

(PoP) together with 4

GiB Gib or GIB may refer to: Places * Gibraltar, British overseas territory ** Gibraltar International Airport, IATA code GIB ** Gibraltar national football team, FIFA code GIB * Mount Gibraltar, known as The Gib, New South Wales, Australia * Gib ...

LPDDR4X Low-Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR), also known as LPDDR SDRAM, is a type of synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) that consumes less power than other random access memory designs and is thus targeted for mobile computing devices such ...

memory in the iPhone XS and XS Max and 3 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone XR, the iPad Air (2019), the 5th generation iPad mini, and the iPad (2020). 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. The A12 has video codec encoding support for

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In co ...

and

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and d ...

. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, and

Motion JPEG Motion JPEG (M-JPEG or MJPEG) is a video compression format in which each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is compressed separately as a JPEG image. Originally developed for multimedia PC applications, Motion JPEG e ...

Products that include the Apple A12 Bionic

* iPhone XS & XS Max *

* iPad (8th generation) * Apple TV 4K (2nd generation)

References

{{Application ARM-based chips Computer-related introductions in 2018 Apple silicon

Design

Products that include the Apple A12 Bionic

See also

References