Apple A9X vs Apple A10 Fusion

Apple A9X

The Apple A9X is a high-end ARM SoC (System on a Chip) that was announced in September 2015 in the iPad Pro. Technical details are scarce, what we know is that it is based on the third generation of Apples 64 Bit architecture (Cyclone 3) and manufactured with a "new transistor technology" (14 or 16nm FINFet probably).

The performance of the A9X did improve a lot according to Apple. The CPU part should be 1.8x faster and the GPU part even 2x faster than the already speedy Apple A8X. Apple even stated in the keynote of the iPad Pro that the performance should be "faster than 80% of portable PCs shipped in the last 12 month". Furthermore the iPad Pro now features a 2x higher memory bandwidth (DDR4?) and 2x faster storage performance. The integrated graphics card will most likely be a PowerVR design again (Power VR Series7?).

Apple A10 Fusion

The Apple A10 Fusion is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple that is built into the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. It integrates four 64 Bit cores that are divided in two clusters. Two high performance cores are clocked at up to 2.34 GHz and should be around 40% faster than the Apple A9 (according to Apple) and two low power cores (up to 1.1 GHz?). Up to now its unclear if all four cores can be used at once (that need only 1/5 th of the energy in some use cases). At the release of the iPhone 7 it looks like that IOS is only using two cores at a time and automatically switches between the two clusters. Therefore, apps are seeing only a dual core. The principle is similar to the first generation of ARMs big.LITTLE concept.

The integrated graphics card of the SoC will most likely stem from PowerVR (again) and perform 50% faster at 2/3 of the power consumption (according to Apple). 

All in all the chip includes 3.3 billion transistors, which is more than a current AMD Bristol Ridge (3.1) and Skylake Quad-Core (1.75)  X86 SoCs.

Sources: Apple Keynote, Ars Technica