Apple’s new iPhones come with a brand new chip called the A12 Bionic. The company says it’s the industry’s first 7-nanometer chip and contains 6.9 billion transistors. That statement is true, to an extent — it’s the first chip that will be commercially available to the public. Last month, Huawei also announced a 7-nanometer chip called the Kirin 980. It will debut in the company’s Mate 20 flagship, and sub-brand Honor’s Magic 2 sometime in the future. Both Apple and Huawei partnered with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer Company (TSMC) to develop the high-powered silicon, which is why they’re debuting so close to one another.
Inside the A12 Bionic is a six-core CPU, comprising of two performance cores and four efficiency cores. The two performance cores are supposed to be 15 percent faster and 40 percent more power efficient than their equivalent in the A11 Bionic. The efficiency cores, meanwhile, consume 50 percent less power than Apple’s previous chip. While its predecessor had a two-core Neural Engine, the new A12 will chip with an eight-core version that’s capable of crunching five trillion operations every second. In practice, this should mean additional processing power for intensive apps.
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