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A12Z Bionic Chip in iPad Pro Allegedly a Renamed A12X With Extra GPU Core Enabled
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wow is right!
I do believe that anyone with a 2018 iPad Pro, won't benefit from the upgrade, but anyone thinking about upgrading to the old iPad Pro will be highly pleased. it seems that the only spec you are interested in is release date? if you check benchmarks, the iPad Pro is faster than an Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2 GHz (4 cores), which is a pretty hefty cpu.
And I am sure that closing production around the world had no impact on anything whatsoever, that coronavirus is just a hoax, not really happening folks, nothing to see here.
Wow is right
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hahahahaha, really? a12x <> a12z does the ACC not like the letter zed?
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and it has so much trouble running weather simulations, best to keep with supercomputers on that one.
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and lower prices, and wifi 6
A voice of common sense around these parts. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. That makes the most sense of all!
Faster?
On Geekbench, they seem to be basically equal.
On single-core, 1122 for the iMac, 1111 for the iPad Pro.
On multi-core, 4577 for the iMac, 4574 for the iPad Pro.
This despite the iPad Pro having twice the amount of cores; so it scales more poorly.
It will also throttle much quicker.
(OTOH, the iMac needs 70% more clock to reach those numbers!)
If you have a 2018 model, upgrading is idiotic. Plain and simple. This update is for those who did not upgrade last time.
Apple did this before, a few years back. The real upgrade is coming later in the year. No one is upgrading just for a sensor. 🙄
All of you who want Apple to transition to ARM-based Macs should sit up and take notice.
This is the same behavior many use to justify a transition from Intel to ARM—stagnation. This is basically a rebadged two year old chip.
Why no progress? Lack of competition? How will this change if Macs move to ARM where there would be no other direct competition?
Those who claim Apple can / will continually improve the performance of their ARM processors and put x86 to shame, how do you reconcile that claim with this fact?
This is the same behavior many use to justify a transition from Intel to ARM—stagnation. This is basically a rebadged two year old chip.
Why no progress? Lack of competition? How will this change if Macs move to ARM where there would be no other direct competition?
Those who claim Apple can / will continually improve the performance of their ARM processors and put x86 to shame, how do you reconcile that claim with this fact?
Using common sense, I guess?
First off, I suspect we are getting the A12Z now and not the A13X because if the rumours are accurate, we might be getting the A14X chip at the end of the year. If this is the case, this means that Apple is putting all their resources into creating the A14X, and it makes no sense to get distracted by having to work on an A13X chip which will only be in use for half a year.
So in the meantime, if Apple wants to do an iPad update at this point, they really only have 2 processor choices available to them - A12X or A13. And it seems that the A12X is still better than the A13 when it comes to performance on the sort of tasks you would want to do on an iPad. So Apple actually made the right call here by opting to not go with a chip that sounds newer on paper just for marketing purposes, and instead opting to use the specs they knew would result in the better user experience for the end user.
And it's not like Apple purposely decided to focus on creating the A12Z over the A13X. The A12Z is really just a higher-quality version of the A12X. Or to put it another way, the A12X is actually the rejected stock that occurs when Apple tried to manufacture the A12Z chip way back in end-2018 and failed. But people can't complain because they basically got what was advertised by Apple.
What changed now is that production yields have improved, and Apple is able to manufacture the original A12X chip in high-enough quantities that they can now market it as the A12Z, which tells the customer that it is more or less similar to the A12X in terms of performance, but slightly better (if it matters to them).
Apple can't enable something that was never there.
The A12X has 7 graphics cores because one was essentially not working at the point of creation. You can't go back and magically make it work all of sudden. Now, it is, and here we are.
You got what you paid for when you bought the 2018 iPad Pro, just as you will be getting what you paid for if you decided to get the 2020 iPad Pro.
I don't understand what is so hard for people to understand. Back in 2018, yields of the A12Z chip (as it is know today) was so low that Apple decided to use the rejected stock (which is still a very powerful chip in its own right) instead. Hence the A12X chip was born, and I have not heard any complaints of the iPad Pro being too slow or underpowered. If anything, the criticism was mainly centered around the software not being able to keep up.
Today, Apple is able to produce enough of the original A12X chip design (which is the A12Z chip of today) to put in all of the 2020 iPad Pro models.
That's all there is to it. The realities of a complex manufacturing process dictating what ended up inside an iPad (and what didn't).
70% more clock and 13x the power draw* to do the same amount of work! Even if giving an ARM chip a 91W power budget and equalling out the clock speeds didn't yield 13x the performance (I actually doubt it would) the performance/watt benefit here is clear. Apple are just able to optimise the chip for its use conditions in a way Intel simply can't. This is why Apple designed chips at least in thin and light laptops is a necessary step and I really think something to be excited about!
*I'm assuming here the A12X behaves itself with its 7W TDP, I assume being passively cooled it must do. Equally though, the 7700K has a 91W TDP but I know Intel chips do peak above this even if it isn't wholly sustainable.
I'm not sure what's worth getting, I have a first gen 10.5 iPad pro. Yes, the upgrade to a better stylus and Apple finally adding trackpad support is a welcome addition but that's an iOS update. A 350 dollar keyboard on top of a tablet that's running close to a grand makes it too expensive I think.
Definitely. I’m only questioning the assertion that “the iPad Pro is faster than an Intel Core i7-7700K”.
A13 was released last year and A14 is already being manufactured. A14X will be in the next iPad Pro, rumored for fall or winter quarter.
Don’t panic, there’s been no stagnation lol. You have no idea what will come out next year for the ARM-based Macs, either.
Because those cores don’t work. Nor were those cores ever promised to anyone.
Nearly EVERY cpu has redundant circuitry that is disabled by blowing fuses during testing. When you are fabbing a chip with billions of transistors, the chance that all of them work approaches zero. So you put more on there than you need.
If you have a 2018 model, upgrading is idiotic. Plain and simple. This update is for those who did not upgrade last time.
Apple did this before, a few years back. The real upgrade is coming later in the year. No one is upgrading just for a sensor.
All that’s coming end of the year is 5G model and 14x chip so nothing ground breaking
No doubt that Apple ARM-Based on Macs performance will need to be faster and does not need a fan to prevent overheating.
Not my guess, Jon Prosser is basically claiming it won’t happen til 2021. Hell with how things are it may get delayed till 2021 for the 5G/ A14x
Ok. It would be weird for them to do another update this year just for the processor (I write off 5g only because most people don’t buy cellular iPads, so for most people that would mean two nothing-burger iPad updates in the same year). Seems like if miniLED is pushed to next year, so will the new chip and 5G.
What’s the problem with that? It’s consistent with the benchmark results. There is quite frankly nothing close to pushing the limits of the A12X in iPadOS or any of the available apps, and Apple wasn’t ready to go 5nm. I was a little surprised they didn’t go A13X, but A9X to A10X was not as big a jump as A10X to A12X.