Apple A14 Bionic vs Apple A12Z Bionic

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 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).