Apple A10 Fusion vs Apple A10X Fusion
Apple A10 Fusion
► remove from comparison
The Apple A10 Fusion is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple that is built into the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. It integrates four 64 Bit cores that are divided in two clusters. Two high performance cores are clocked at up to 2.34 GHz and should be around 40% faster than the Apple A9 (according to Apple) and two low power cores (up to 1.1 GHz?). Up to now its unclear if all four cores can be used at once (that need only 1/5 th of the energy in some use cases). At the release of the iPhone 7 it looks like that IOS is only using two cores at a time and automatically switches between the two clusters. Therefore, apps are seeing only a dual core. The principle is similar to the first generation of ARMs big.LITTLE concept.
The integrated graphics card of the SoC will most likely stem from PowerVR (again) and perform 50% faster at 2/3 of the power consumption (according to Apple).
All in all the chip includes 3.3 billion transistors, which is more than a current AMD Bristol Ridge (3.1) and Skylake Quad-Core (1.75) X86 SoCs.
Sources: Apple Keynote, Ars Technica
Apple A10X Fusion
► remove from comparisonThe Apple A10X Fusion is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple that is built into the 2017 iPad Pro models. It integrates six 64 Bit cores that are divided in two clusters. Three high performance cores are clocked at up to 2.39 GHz. The three power saving cores are used for non demanding tasks. It looks like only one of both clusters is able to run at a time (therefore the apps see only three cores). The principle is similar to the first generation of ARMs big.LITTLE concept.
The performance of the SoC is positioned in the high and and clearly faster than all previous Apple SoCs. Even compared to Android high-end SoCs like the Snapdragon 835, the A10X takes the lead (e.g. in Geekbench or Antutu).
The integrated graphics card of the SoC will most likely stem from PowerVR (again) and features 12 cores instead of 6 in the A10 SoC.
According to TechInsights, the A10X is manufactured in the brand new 10 nm FinFet process at TSMC. Altough it offers more function blocks, the A10X is with measured 96.4 mm2 significantly smaller than the previous A9X (143.9 mm2).
| Model | Apple A10 Fusion | Apple A10X Fusion |
| Codename | APL1021 Hurricane / Zephyr | Cyclone 4? |
| Series | Apple Apple A-Series | Apple Apple A-Series |
| Clock | 2340 MHz | 2390 MHz |
| Cores / Threads | 4 / 2 | 6 / 3 |
| Transistors | 3300 Million | 3300 Million |
| Technology | 16 nm | 10 nm |
| Features | ARMv8 Instruction Set | ARMv8 Instruction Set |
| iGPU | Apple A10 Fusion GPU / PowerVR (900 MHz) | Apple A10X Fusion GPU / PowerVR |
| Architecture | ARM | ARM |
| Announced |
Benchmarks
Average Benchmarks Apple A10 Fusion → 100% n=11
Average Benchmarks Apple A10X Fusion → 139% n=11
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
