Apple A12

Apple A12 Bionic

General information
Launched	September 12, 2018; 6 years ago (2018-09-12)
Discontinued	October 18, 2022; 2 years ago (2022-10-18)
Designed by	Apple Inc.
Common manufacturer	TSMC[1]
Product code	APL1W81[2]
Max. CPU clock rate	to 2.49[3] GHz
Cache
L1 cache	128 KB instruction, 128 KB data
L2 cache	8 MB
Architecture and classification
Application	Mobile
Technology node	7 nm[4][5] (N7)[6]
Microarchitecture	"Vortex" and "Tempest"
Instruction set	A64 – ARMv8.3-A
Physical specifications
Transistors	6.9 billion
Cores	6 (ARM big.LITTLE: 2× big Vortex + 4× little Tempest)[4][7]
GPU	Apple-designed 4 core "Apple G11P"[4][7]
Products, models, variants
Variant	Apple S4/S5 SiP (cut-down version that utilizes high efficiency cores from A12) Apple A12X/A12Z (more advanced version of A12 in iPad Pro and Developer Transition Kit
History
Predecessor	Apple A11 Bionic
Successor	Apple A13 Bionic

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]

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]

• iPhone XS & XS Max
• iPhone XR
• iPad Mini (5th generation)
• iPad Air (3rd generation)
• iPad (8th generation)
• Apple TV 4K (2nd generation)

• Apple silicon, the range of ARM-based processors designed by Apple
• Apple A12X
• Comparison of Armv8-A processors