Apple's A12 Bionic announced with some serious performance upgrades

Building upon the progress Apple made with last year’s A11 Bionic, the new A12 chip once again includes a six-core CPU based on its own Fusion architecture. As was the case last year, the CPU features 2 high-performance cores and four efficiency cores. In the case of the former, these are simultaneously 15% faster and 40% more efficient. Likewise, the four efficiency cores now use just half the power previously required. Elsewhere, Apple has also made some huge advancements. 

Last year marked the first time Apple had made use of a custom-made GPU – the effort certainly paid off as the GPU has consistently outperformed rival chips. And this year, the company is back with some rather drastic improvements that result in a 50% increase in speed. This is possible thanks to the new custom-made four-core setup – last year’s made use of only three cores. 

In addition to this, the company has made some huge improvements to the dedicated neural engine. Specifically, the Silicon Valley-based giant has swapped out last year’s dual-core design for a drastically better eight-core setup. To put the performance gains into perspective, last year’s A11 Bionic was capable of processing 600 billion operations per second. With this year’s A12 Bionic, though, the neural processor will be capable of handling a staggering 5 trillion operations per second.

Completing the setup on Apple’s A12 Bionic is a much more powerful image signal processor that will result in significantly improved photography results. On an additional note, the increased efficiency is said to result in a battery life increase of 30 minutes on the iPhone XS when compared to the iPhone X. Likewise, the processor and larger battery on the iPhone XS Max will result in an extra 1 hour and 30 minutes of power.

source: Apple