Nvidia Tegra X1 vs Apple A13 Bionic vs Apple A12 Bionic

Nvidia Tegra X1

The NVIDIA Tegra X1 (Tegra 6, Codename Erista) is a 64-Bit high performance ARM based SoC (System on a Chip) for (mainly Android based) tablets and embedded systems (like cars). It contains four ARM Cortex A57 and four ARM Cortex A53 cores in the processor part. As a graphics card, Nvidia integrated a Maxwell based GPU with 256 CUDA cores (see for more details and benchmarks). The integrated memory controller supports LPDDR3 and LPDDR4 with a maximum bandwidth of 25.6 GB/s (2x 32 Bit LPDDR4-3200). The Tegra X1 is the successor to the exactly one year earlier announced Tegra K1 SoC.

Similar to the Symsung Exynos 5433, the Tegra X1 uses a big.LITTLE combination of four power saving and small Cortex-A53 cores and four powerful Cortex-A57 cores. Nvidia however uses an own cluster migration solution instead of the ARM Global Task Scheduling (GTS) and therefore only one of the two quad-core clusters is active at a time.

The performance of the processor cores should be in the high-end segment of ARM based SoCs. Nvidia states that the X1 offers a twice as high energy efficiency compared to the Exynos 5433 (same ARM cores at 1.9 GHz manufactured in 20nm).

Due to the big Maxwell graphics card the SoC is mainly aimed at tablets with good cooling solutions and wont be commonly seen in smartphones. The Tegra X1 is produced at TSMC in 20nm.

Apple A13 Bionic

The Apple A13 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 11 series. It was announced late 2019 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. Compared to the previous A12 Bionic, the A13 should offer a 20% improved CPU performance at 40% lower power (according to Apple).

With 8.5 billion transistors, the A13 Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion).

Apple A12 Bionic

The Apple A12 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone Xs and Xr. It was announced late 2018 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. Compared to the previous A11 Bionic, the A12 should offer a 15% improved CPU performance for the performance cores and a 50% lower power consumption for the efficiency cores (both according to Apple).

The chip also includes a new GPU that is advertised as 50% faster, the M12 Motion co-processor and a Neural Engine with 8 cores for up to 5 trillion operations per second.

With 6.9 billion transistors, the A12 Bionic is a big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion). Compared to the A11, the A12 integrates 60% more transistors.