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Apple A12
System on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Apple A12 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series,[8] It first appeared in the iPhone XS and XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad Air (3rd generation), iPad Mini (5th generation), iPad (8th generation) and Apple TV 4K (2nd generation).[8][5] Apple states that the two high-performance cores are 15% faster and 40% more energy-efficient than the Apple A11's, and the four high-efficiency cores use 50% less power than the A11's.[8][7] It is the first mass-market system on a chip to be built using the 7 nm process.[9]
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The Apple A12 SoC features an Apple-designed 64-bit ARMv8.3-A six-core CPU, with two high-performance cores called Vortex, running at 2.49 GHz, and four energy-efficient cores called Tempest.[4][5] The Vortex cores are a 7-wide decode out-of-order superscalar design, while the Tempest cores are a 3-wide decode out-of-order superscalar design. Like the A11's Mistral cores, the Tempest cores are based on Apple's Swift cores from the Apple A6.[10]
The A12 also integrates an Apple-designed four-core graphics processing unit (GPU) with 50% faster graphics performance than the A11.[4][8] The A12 includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Next-generation Neural Engine."[11] This neural network hardware has eight cores[7] and can perform up to 5 trillion 8-bit operations per second.[4][5] Unlike the A11's Neural Engine, third-party apps can access the A12's Neural Engine.[12]
The A12 is manufactured by TSMC[1] using a 7 nm[5] FinFET process, the first to ship in a consumer product,[4][1] containing 6.9 billion transistors.[1] The die size of the A12 is 83.27 mm2, 5% smaller than the A11.[13] It is manufactured in a package on package (PoP) together with 4 GiB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone XS[2] and XS Max[13] and 3 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone XR, the iPad Air (2019), the 5th generation iPad mini, and the iPad (2020).[14] The ARMv8.3 instruction set it supports brings a significant security improvement in the form of pointer authentication, which mitigates exploitation techniques such as those involving memory corruption, Jump-Oriented-Programming, and Return-Oriented-Programming.[15]
The A12 has video codec encoding support for HEVC and H.264. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, and Motion JPEG.[16]
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Products that include the Apple A12 Bionic
See also
- Apple silicon, the range of ARM-based processors designed by Apple
- Apple A12X
- Comparison of Armv8-A processors
References
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