Apple A12Z Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G

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).

Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G Mobile Platform (SM8250-AC) is a high-end smartphone and tablet SoC that Qualcomm announced in mid 2021. The SoC integrates a fast ‘Prime Core’ that clocks up to 3.2 GHz and three additional ARM Cortex-A77 performance cores, which can reach up to 2.42 GHz. These are complemented by four power-saving ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clock up to a maximum of 1.8 GHz. Compared to the similar and older Snapdragon 865+, the Prime Core clocks 100 MHz faster and the GPU is slightly higher clocked.

Therefore, the Snapdragon 870 is slightly faster than the old Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus and slots in behind the high end Snapdragon 888.

The Mobile Platform integrates a Qualcomm X55 5G modem with Sub-5 and mmWave support and global 5G bands with up to 7.5 GBit/s (download) speed. The SmartConnect 6800 modem supports Wi-Fi 6 with 8x8 MU-MIMU and 60 GHz 11ay up to 10 Gbps. 

The integrated GPU is still called Adreno 650 and offers a slightly higher clock speed of 670 MHz.

The on board Hexagon 698 DSP now offers a KI performance of up to 15 TOPS (up from 7 TOPS in the 855) and still uses a combination of CPU, GPU, HVX and Tensor cores. The Spectra 480 ISP is also untouched. The integrated Computer Vision Engine (CV-ISP) now supports Dolby Vision, 8K videos and 200 megapixel photos.

The built-in memory controller supports LPDDR5 with up to 2,750 MHz and LPDDR4X with 2,133 MHz.

The SoC is manufactured in the modern and power efficient 7nm process.