Bionic A12 chip may be even more powerful than Apple says

If you remember the details of the last keynote certainly recall the moment when Apple started talking about its new mobile chip, the A12 Bionic, which equips XS iPhones, XS Max and XR. Among the many new features and improvements introduced in the component, the company stated that it is about 15% more powerful than its predecessor, the A11 Bionic which equips the iPhones 8, 8 Plus and X. According to one expert, however, Ma can being modest in this estimate.

The expert in the case, Andrei Frumusanu, from AnandTech Website known for its extremely technical and in-depth reviews of new handsets and technologies. In a very thorough review of the XS and XS Max iPhones, Frumusanu wrecked all the A12 Bionic news on both pages and pages. benchmarks, tests and comparisons, coming to a series of very encouraging conclusions.

The review completes a treat for those who like the technical part and the numbers (and those who speak English, of course), but here are some highlights. Most impressive of all, I would say, note that Ma's new chip can actually be about 40% more powerful than its predecessor, far more than Apple is saying. In some cases, this improvement may be even better, and the processor can achieve performance even at computer chips.

Apple's marketing department is really being modest about the improvements here by talking about 15% many of the processes will see performance improvements that I estimate to be around 40%, with even greater gains in some specific cases. Apple's CPUs have become so powerful that we are only a few margins below the best desktop processors; It will be interesting to see how this will develop in the coming years and what it means for Macs.

On average, based on benchmark SPECint2006 (which, according to the analyzer, takes into account a larger and more complex set of data to score processors), the A12 Bionic outperformed 24% better than its predecessor. Energy efficiency has improved by 12%, although the new chip spends a little more energy on intensive tasks the A12 achieved an average rate of 3.64W while the A11 was around 3.36W.

A12 Bionic Chip InsideGive the guts of the A12 Bionic | Image: AnandTech

By all measures, Ma's new CPU outperformed the world's top Android competitors, such as Samsung Exynos 9810, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 and Huawei Kirin 970. The A12 Bionic was better than all of them in performance and energy efficiency, in All scenarios according to the analyzer, equating the performances with the energy rate used, the Ma chip about 3x higher in efficiency.

The graphics performance of the chip was also praised, but with caveats:

In terms of GPU, Apple's promised performance gains are within the promised numbers and even above them if we consider the performance maintained. The new GPU seems to be a variation on last year's design, but the addition of a fourth core and major memory compression area introductions allow performance to rise to new heights. The downside here that I think Apple should review the mechanism of throttling and in the sense that it should be applied less often, but that the GPU should be slowed more often or even limited at the end of the performance curve, considering that it consumes too much power and overheats the device in the early minutes from a gambling session.

Overall, the analysis was extremely impressed with the performance of Apple's new chips and there really is no disagreement: if there is an area where Ma has exceeded expectations year after year, even in a period of creativity not very fruitful, the of their own processors. If that doesn't get you excited about the future of Cupertino computing, I don't know what else you can do.

via MacRumors