Take an In-Depth Look at the New A12X Bionic in the iPad Pro

Whether or not the new iPad Pro can replace your laptop is still far from a consensus, but what reviews of the new tablet all agree on is just how powerful the device is.

That comes courtesy of the brand new A12X Bionic processor that Apple tucked inside the remarkably thin case. This is an evolutionary step over the A12 Bionic processor that the company introduced with the iPhone XS, XS Max, and the iPhone XR, but the changes that Apple made for the larger-screened device are striking, to say the least. Apple, in its own efforts to promote the device, says the new tablet is more powerful than 92 percent of the personal computers on the market right now.

So how did the company get there? Well, let Apple’s Anand Shimpi and Phil Schiller take an in-depth look at the processor courtesy of Ars Technica. The publication hits on just about everything you would want to see in this sort of deep dive, including a top-down look at the CPU itself, Geekbench scores, inspection of the graphics performance, and looking at the improved Neural Engine therein.

“The iPad Pro’s CPU has eight cores—four focused on performance, and four focused on efficiency. And unlike some earlier Apple chips, all cores can be active at once. This is the first device in this product line that uses this many cores simultaneously.

‘We’ve got our own custom-designed performance controller that lets you use all eight at the same time,’ Shimpi told Ars. ‘And so when you’re running these heavily-threaded workloads, things that you might find in pro workflows and pro applications, that’s where you see the up to 90 percent improvement over A10X.'”

As far as the graphics performance is concerned, Apple told the world that their new tablet is on the same level as the Xbox One S, which is a video game console that Microsoft has on the market right now.

“It’s or first 7-core implementation of our own custom-designed GPU,” he said. “Each one of these cores is both faster and more efficient than what we had in the A10X and the result is, that’s how you get to the 2x improved graphics performance. It’s unheard of in this form factor, this is really an Xbox One S class GPU. And again, it’s in a completely fanless design.”

How about competition in the chips market, which is only just starting to build up. But none of that matters, because, according to Schiller, Apple will “lap them ten times” in results as long as it means that the customers continue to benefit from what Apple is working on.

“We don’t care if they’re doing something that isn’t interesting to us. We don’t care if we’re lapping them. Good. We’ll lap them ten times. It doesn’t matter because it’s in service to the user, not the competition.”

The full in-depth look at the new A12X Bionic processor is ready for your eyeballs through the source link below, and it’s certainly worth checking out.

Are you planning on picking up the new iPad Pro?

[via Ars Technica]

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