Apple A12X Bionic vs Intel Xeon E-2176M

Apple A12X Bionic

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).

Intel Xeon E-2176M

The Intel Xeon E-2176M is a high-end processor for professional laptops with six cores based on the Coffee Lake architecture. The processor clocks at between 2.7 - 4.4 GHz (4.1 GHz with 6 cores) and can execute up to twelve threads simultaneously thanks to Hyper-Threading. 

According to Intel, the CPU is manufactured in an improved 14nm (14nm++) process. The Xeon E-2176M is the second fastest model after the Xeon E-2178M / Core i9-8950HK in early 2018. Compared to the similar consumer Core i7-8850H, the mobile Xeon offers support for ECC main memory, is slightly higher clocked and offers more L3 cache.

The Coffee Lake architecture is similar to Kaby Lake and differs only in the amount of cores (now six cores for the high end versions) and the improved 14nm process (14nm++ according to Intel).

Performance

Due to the two additional cores, performance has increased by almost 50% compared to a similar clocked Kaby Lake processor.

Graphics

The integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 iGPU is unchanged to the older Intel HD Graphics 630 an maybe only slightly higher clocked. We do expect a performance improvement, but as a low-end solution it will probably only display current games smoothly at reduced details - if at all.

Power Consumption

Intel specifies the TDP with 45 watts and therefore the i9 is only suited for big laptops with good cooling solutions.