The Apple A12 Bionic is a

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit Integer (computer science), integers, memory addresses, or other Data (computing), data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing unit, CPUs and arithmetic logic unit, ALUs are those ...

ARM-based

system on a chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

(SoC) designed by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

It first appeared in the iPhone XS and XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad Air (3rd generation),

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, designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc. Announced in a press release along with ...

, 8th generation iPad and Apple TV 4K (2nd generation). Apple states that the two high-performance cores are 15% faster and 50% 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. and manufactured by TSMC. It first appeared in the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and iPhone X which were introduced on September 12, 2017. Apple states that the ...

'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.

Design

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

ARMv8.3-A AArch64 or ARM64 is the 64-bit extension of the ARM architecture family. It was first introduced with the Armv8-A architecture. Arm releases a new extension every year. ARMv8.x and ARMv9.x extensions and features Announced in October 2011, AR ...

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 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 instruction per clock cycle, a sup ...

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 A12 also integrates an Apple-designed four-core

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

(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; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semicon ...

using a 7 nm

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 channel, f ...

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 discrete logic and memory ball grid array (BGA) packages. Two or more packages are installed atop each other, i.e. stacked, with a standard interface to rout ...

(PoP) together with 4

GiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

of LPDDR4X 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 compari ...

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

Products that include the Apple A12 Bionic

* iPhone XS & XS Max * iPhone XR *

* iPad Air (3rd generation) * iPad (8th generation) * Apple TV 4K (2nd generation)

Gallery

References

{{Application ARM-based chips A12 ARM architecture Computer-related introductions in 2018 64-bit microprocessors Apple silicon

Design

Products that include the Apple A12 Bionic

Gallery

See also

References