Apple A12X Bionic vs Apple A16 Bionic
Apple A12X Bionic
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The Apple A12X Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPad Pro 11 and 12.5-inch from 2018. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power efficiency cores (up from the 6 cores in the A12 of the iPhone XS). Compared to the previous A10X in the old iPad Pro models, Apple advertises up to 95% higher performance of the CPU cores.
The chip also includes a new GPU with 7 cores, the M12 Motion co-processor and a Neural Engine with 8 cores for up to 5 trillion operations per second.
With 10 billion transistors (A12 6.9 billion), the A12X Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion).
Apple A16 Bionic
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The Apple A16 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 14 Pro (2022) models. It offers 6 cores divided in two performance cores (codename Everest, up to 3.46 GHz) and four power-efficiency cores (codename Sawtooth, up to 2.02). According to Apple, the most improvements were made to the efficiency cores and the improved memory bandwidth (+50% thanks to LPDDR5). According to the die analysis from angstronomics, the e-core cluster still has the same 4 MB L2 cache, but the p-cores now offer 16 MB L2 cache. The SLC (System Level Cache) however seems to be reduced to 24 MB.
The Neural Engine still offers 16 cores and offers an increased performance of 17 TOPS (vs. 15.8 of the A15) for AI tasks. The integrated graphics engine still offers 5 cores and benefits mostly from the higher memory bandwidth. The new display engine supports adaptive refresh rates down to 1 Hz, the new always-on display, and improved anti-aliasing (for the dynamic island animations).
The CPU performance only shows small improvements to the last generation (Apple A15 Bionic). Still, the A16 is by far the fastest mobile CPU for smartphones and leaves e.g. the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 easily behind (in Geekbench 5.4 single- and multi-thread tests).
The chip is manufactured on the modern 4nm process at TSMC and integrates nearly 16 billion transistors (compared to the 15.8 billion of the A15 and 11.8 of the A14). Apple emphasized on efficiency and e.g. mentioned 20% power savings for the big performance cores and class-leading efficiency of the e-cores.
| Model | Apple A12X Bionic | Apple A16 Bionic | ||||||||
| Codename | Vortex, Tempest | Crete | ||||||||
| Series | Apple Apple A-Series | Apple Apple A-Series | ||||||||
| Series: Apple A-Series Vortex, Tempest |
| |||||||||
| Clock | <=2490 MHz | 2020 - 3460 MHz | ||||||||
| L1 Cache | 2 MB | |||||||||
| L2 Cache | 8 MB | 20 MB | ||||||||
| Cores / Threads | 8 / 8 | 6 / 6 | ||||||||
| Transistors | 10000 Million | 16000 Million | ||||||||
| Technology | 7 nm | 4 nm | ||||||||
| Features | ARMv8 Instruction Set | ARMv8 Instruction Set, Machine Learning Controller, 16-Core Neural Engine, Secure Enclave, Advanced Image Signal Processor | ||||||||
| iGPU | Apple A12X Bionic GPU | Apple A16 GPU 5-Core | ||||||||
| NPU / AI | 5 TOPS INT8 | 17 TOPS INT8 | ||||||||
| Architecture | ARM | ARM | ||||||||
| Announced | ||||||||||
| L3 Cache | 24 MB |
Benchmarks
Average Benchmarks Apple A12X Bionic → 100% n=9
Average Benchmarks Apple A16 Bionic → 143% n=9
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
