Apple A12 Bionic vs Apple A10 Fusion vs Apple A10X Fusion

Apple A12 Bionic

The Apple A12 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone Xs and Xr. It was announced late 2018 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. Compared to the previous A11 Bionic, the A12 should offer a 15% improved CPU performance for the performance cores and a 50% lower power consumption for the efficiency cores (both according to Apple).

The chip also includes a new GPU that is advertised as 50% faster, the M12 Motion co-processor and a Neural Engine with 8 cores for up to 5 trillion operations per second.

With 6.9 billion transistors, the A12 Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion). Compared to the A11, the A12 integrates 60% more transistors.

Apple A10 Fusion

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

The 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).