Apple A12Z Bionic vs Apple A15 Bionic

Apple A12Z Bionic

The Apple A12Z Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPad Pro 11 and 12.5-inch from 2020. 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). The difference to the older Apple A12X Bionic in the iPad Pro 2018 models seems to be an additional GPU core. Regarding CPU Apple noted: "Enhanced thermal design means higher peak and longer sustained performance". More details were not published by Apple, so it may be even the same chip with an additional enabled GPU core. On the other hand, it could be also manufactured in an improved 7nm (EUV?) process and offer higher clock rates. As Apple states no performance improvements on the CPU side, we don't expect big gains. However, the A12X was a very fast ARM based SoC and currently there is no competitor in the Android space that should beat the performance.

The chip also includes the M12 Motion co-processor and a Neural Engine with 8 cores for up to 5 trillion operations per second (unverified, numbers from the A12X).

The Apple A12X included 10 billion transistors (A12 6.9 billion) and the A12Z should be therefore offer a similar amount. This makes it a quite big chip, especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core SoC (1.75 Billion).

Apple A15 Bionic

The Apple A15 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 13 and iPad Mini (2021) models. It was announced late 2021 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. The CPU performance increases only slightly compared to the A14, but GPU (in the higher end models) offers higher gains.

The chip is manufactured in 5nm and integrates 15.8 billion transistors (compared to the 11.8 of the A14).