iPhone XS A12 Bionic chip features 7nm design, next-gen Neural Engine

In revealing the iPhone XS on Wednesday, Apple also detailed its core processor, the 7-nanometer A12 Bionic, which includes a new iteration of its "Neural Engine" for tasks related to machine learning, such as Face ID and animoji.

The latest Neural Engine is an eight-core unit, providing "multiprecision" support and a "smart compute system," Apple said during its press event. Whereas the one in the A11 could handle up to 600 billion operations per second, the new one is capable of 5 trillion.

The heart of the chip is a six-core CPU with two performance cores that are up to 15 percent faster than the A11 while consuming 40 percent less power. Four "efficiency" cores, handling lower-intensity tasks, should consume 50 percent less energy.

Apple claims that the four-core GPU in the A12 Bionic is 50 percent faster than the A11 Bionic. The additional speed and technologies support technologies like tessellation, multilayer rendering, and lossless memory compression.

The company is also promising a faster Secure Enclave associated with the new chipset, which is used for tasks like Face ID authentication. When paired with streamlined algorithms in iOS 12, the new hardware should speed up Face ID recognition versus that in the iPhone X.

A12 Bionic can perform 5 trillion calculations per second

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11 Comments

entropys 4316 comments · 13 Years

About 6 years ago

Pretty impressive. Imagine what next year’s chip will be like after a year of bedding down 7mm fabrication.

Which begs the question, are they really gonna call it an A13?

blastdoor 3594 comments · 15 Years

so here's an interesting little factoid -- the A12 has nearly as many transistors (6.9 billion) as a 22 core Xeon Broadwell from Intel (7.2 billion):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Microprocessors

SpamSandwich 32917 comments · 19 Years

Supercomputers in the hand and on the wrist. Apple is engineering fantastic hardware.

ClarityToSee 34 comments · 7 Years

All these transistors on A12 Bionic, yet they can only squeeze in 15% faster performance than previous generation A11? Something doesn't add up!

ericthehalfbee 4489 comments · 13 Years

ClarityToSee said:

All these transistors on A12 Bionic, yet they can only squeeze in 15% faster performance than previous generation A11? Something doesn't add up!

It adds up perfectly. They also reduced power consumption. And those are the three choices you have: performance increase, power consumption reduced or some combination of both. Apple went with the latter.