Over last few years, Apple’s decision of designing its own processor chips for iPhone has really brought some good results for the smartphone manufacturer. The flagship models from the company have been setting new records with their performance one year after the other. The latest iPhone XS as well as the A12 Bionic chip inside aren’t any different either. Also, considering the features and capabilities touted by Apple at the time of announcement, we were all expecting something big to come our way.
And, now, with detailed review of iPhone XS being published by AnandTech, along with all the insights into this new chip from Apple, we have proof that it’s actually fast.
First thing to notice here is that even though there are around 7 billion more transistors featured in this new A12 Bionic chip in comparison to its previous A11 Bionic counterpart, the chip actually fits on an even smaller die size that has reduced to 83.27mm2 in comparison to 87.66mm2 of the previous model. That’s where Apple’s 7nm process seems to be bearing fruit. In addition, the review has also revealed that the new GPU that is featured in the A12 Bionic chip is actually super fast. Want a taste of it? Well, it can perform almost 75% faster as compared to what we had as part of iPhone X – which itself was a great phone in terms of performance – and it has prove to be twice as quick as SoCs that we are getting in the recently introduced Android models.
In addition, the A12 Bionic seems to be outpacing all the other mobile GPUs being available on market at present. This includes Qualcomm’s Adreno 630 GPU that is featured in Snapdragon 845 chipset. If the chipset name sounds a bit familiar to you, it’s exactly the same piece of equipment that is found in all the flagship Android devices you can find in market today.
Coming back to CPU, AnandTech claims they have noticed a few changes made by Apple to how this chip actually works inherently. The performance of L2 cache has been improved quite a lot as they have improved latency by 29% as compared to what we had previously.
There’s just 5% frequency boost given to Vortex cores in comparison to Monsoon cores, and yet the absolute latency of L2 memory has seen 29% improvement from ~11.5ns coming down to around ~8.8ns. What this means is that the L2 cache in the latest Vortex cores can now complete the operations within significantly fewer cycles as compared to what it did previously.
Now, combine it with Vortex cores that are present in A12 Bionic chip and run at a frequency of 2.5GHz in comparison to the 2.38 GHz of A11 Bionic chip, and that makes it clear that the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer has again ratcheted up its own chips’ performance where the competitors are still lagging behind. Now that is certainly going to fuel the rumors further that Apple’s planning to ditch the Intel’s chips in future and design those of its own even for the Mac lineup as well.
It is highly recommended for you to check out the complete review article from AnandTech if you are interested in getting some more in-depth information on specs as well as the performance graphs of the new A12 Bionic chip compared with its older counterpart. There is certainly a lot more to reveal yet.