Apple A12 Bionic vs Apple A14 Bionic vs Apple A6

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 A14 Bionic

The Apple A14 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 12 and iPad Air (2020) models. It was announced late 2020 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores (Firestorm) and four power efficiency cores (Icestorm). Apple states that the A14 offers a 40 percent higher CPU performance than the old A12 in the iPad Air 2019. That should translate to a modest gain of around 20% compared to the Apple A13. The A14 integrates a fast 4-core-GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine that is able to reach a maximum of 11 TOPS. The memory controller supports LPDDR4X and 4 or 6 GB are directly above the chip (package on package - PoP).

The chip is manufactured in 5nm and integrates 11.8 billion transistors.

Apple A6

The Apple A6 is a dual-core SoC found in the iPhone 5 with ARM compatible CPU cores. The A6 was developed by Apple and supports the extended ARMv7s instruction set. The clock rate of the CPU is between 800 to 1200 MHz depending on the CPU load. The integrated GPU is a PowerVR SGX543MP3 at 266 MHz.