Apple A12 Bionic: The Complete Guide

Apple’s exact words, from the iPhone XR announcement the same month: “the first 7-nanometer chip ever in a smartphone that delivers industry-leading performance in a more power-efficient design” 2. This is the first A-series chip whose Newsroom material states a specific process node.

Apple’s own claim: “For the first time the Neural Engine is open to Core ML” — Apple’s machine-learning framework for third-party apps — and “Core ML running on the A12 Bionic Neural Engine is up to nine times faster than on A11 Bionic, with as little as one-tenth the energy usage” 1.

Apple’s own figures, compared against A11 Bionic: performance cores “up to 15 percent faster,” efficiency cores “up to 50 percent more efficient,” and a “four-core GPU that is up to 50 percent faster” 1. Apple has not disclosed a transistor count for A12 Bionic in any official source found — commonly cited figures for it circulate only in third-party technical coverage, not on apple.com, and are not repeated here as fact.

Figures per Apple’s iPhone XS/XS Max and iPhone XR launch material 12.

Apple’s own wording: “the first 7-nanometer chip ever in a smartphone that delivers industry-leading performance in a more power-efficient design” 2. No Apple source names TSMC or any other foundry; the manufacturer is not confirmed by either company’s official material for this generation.

Apple’s own words on the iPad launch: “Both the new iPad Air and iPad mini include the A12 Bionic chip” 3 — the first time a chip originally built for iPhone carried directly into that year’s iPad refresh with no changes named.

No official Apple source lists a standalone chip price for A12 Bionic; its cost is bundled into the device price.

Apple’s iPad mini comparison, same release: “three times the performance and nine times faster graphics” versus the previous iPad mini (A8-based) 3 — a much larger jump than the iPad Air’s, reflecting how many generations behind the iPad mini had fallen before this refresh. Both are company-published comparisons against specific named prior devices, not independent benchmarks.

A12 Bionic set the process-node pattern later A-series chips would keep chasing: A14 would claim the industry’s first 5-nanometer smartphone chip, and A20 Pro would claim 2-nanometer, both explicit firsts in the same vein A12 established.

A11 Bionic’s Neural Engine existed purely for Apple’s own Face ID and Animoji. A12 Bionic’s Newsroom text explicitly opens it to Core ML “for the first time” 1 — the moment on-device machine learning stopped being an Apple-only feature and became a platform capability every iOS developer could build on.