A12Z Chip in iPad Pro Confirmed to Be Same As A12X, But With Extra GPU Core Enabled

[PickUrPoison]

I don't get the Apple apologetics. I really don't.

It isn't brand new. It's the A-12 series from two years ago with slightly bumped specs. Feels like Apple is starting to go Intel on us.

The A12Z is absolutely brand new—it wasn’t available before two weeks ago. It’s got an additional GPU compared to the A12X it’s based on. It may not be suitably more performant than the A12X for your liking, and that’s fine.

Fact: the 4th gen is a better iPad Pro, and cheaper, than the 3rd gen that was available three weeks ago. For anyone who needs/wants to buy before the 5th gen is released, that’s a win. The alternative is no 4th gen, and Apple simply keeps selling the 3rd gen instead for the next 6-12 months.

That’s a much worse option, right? I don’t understand why people don’t understand that. Is it not crystal clear?

1) If you need or want to buy before the next model is released—whether that’s September or next March—which would you rather have, 3rd or 4th gen? No brainer, right?

2) Will the 5th gen, with a speed bump and better display—both of which are really necessary only for a few—really be so much better than the current model? How much extra are you willing to pay for mini-LED backlight technology?

Interested to hear your thoughts.

 

[PickUrPoison]

I don't think Apple has any more cores left to unlock in their chip.

There’s nothing to “unlock”, nor has there ever been. The problem was the inability to produce the A12X with 8 functional cores at the necessary yield. That problem has been overcome.

There’s no unlocking or enabling that can happen with defective cores, the only thing to be done is to either disable them or trash them. Producing a perfect chip, with no defective GPU cores, is what gives you an A12Z. One defective core and it’s an A12X. Two or more defective cores gives you unusable trash.

Any mischaracterization of this industry standard yield maximization process as “unlocking” or “enabling” cores indicates a profound lack of understanding of the situation.

 

[Bandaman]

The A12Z is absolutely brand new—it wasn’t available before two weeks ago. It’s got an additional GPU compared to the A12X it’s based on. It may not be suitably more performant than the A12X for your liking, and that’s fine.

Fact: the 4th gen is a better iPad Pro, and cheaper, than the 3rd gen that was available three weeks ago. For anyone who needs/wants to buy before the 5th gen is released, that’s a win. The alternative is no 4th gen, and Apple simply keeps selling the 3rd gen instead for the next 6-12 months.

That’s a much worse option, right? I don’t understand why people don’t understand that. Is it not crystal clear?

1) If you need or want to buy before the next model is released—whether that’s September or next March—which would you rather have, 3rd or 4th gen? No brainer, right?

2) Will the 5th gen, with a speed bump and better display—both of which are really necessary only for a few—really be so much better than the current model? How much extra are you willing to pay for mini-LED backlight technology?

Interested to hear your thoughts.

It's absolutely not brand new. That's the entire point of this thread.

 

[gnasher729]

Can you please elaborate more? Specifically why the new iPad fixes this blocker?

That's basic maths.

As time goes by, the manufacturer gets better at producing cores. Maybe initially only 90% of cores work fine, and over two years the number goes up to 99%. Now you can take your calculator out and calculate how many processors with 8 cores would have eight working cores if 90% of the cores work fine vs. if 99% of the cores work fine. If you want to ship with 8 working cores, the others have to be thrown away. Then calculate how many processors have 7 working cores.

If they had wanted to ship with eight working cores in 2018, half the processors would have to be thrown away, which doubles the price of the processor. Now the yield is better, they can afford to require eight working cores. Instead of having to throw away half the chips, only 8 percent are thrown out. (And those can probably be used for some other device).

 

[PickUrPoison]

It's absolutely not brand new. That's the entire point of this thread.

No, it’s brand new. Not available before. You’ve got to buy the brand new iPad Pro to get it. But it depends on your personal definition of brand new. Whatever. You don’t have to call a faster chip with an increased core count—that’s only been available for a few weeks, and only on the latest iPad Pro models—brand new if you don’t want to... suit yourself 🤷‍♂️

But you’ve got absolutely no response to the main points of my post? You still don’t understand why the 4th gen is so much better than the 3rd gen, and why the 5th gen will be a small upgrade from the 4th?

 

[PostApple2016BrainWash]

It's absolutely not brand new. That's the entire point of this thread.

Agreed. There is literally nothing new in the A12Z.

 

[PickUrPoison]

Agreed. There is literally nothing new in the A12Z.

There literally is 🙄

 

[itsmilo]

I am surprised they don’t offer a unlock service to unlock the extra core on your 2018 iPad Pro model for only 399$

 

[PostApple2016BrainWash]

I am surprised they don’t offer a unlock service to unlock the extra core on your 2018 iPad Pro model for only 399$

It is too much of hassle for Apple and Tim Cook only care about profits over making insanely great products.

 

[I7guy]

It is too much of hassle for Apple and Tim Cook only care about profits over making insanely great products.

Profits come from making insanely great products.

 

[PickUrPoison]

It is too much of hassle for Apple and Tim Cook only care about profits over making insanely great products.

$399 sounds like a great profit 🤣 So much for that theory lol.

But yeah, Apple’s not interested in having people “turn on” a defective core. Who in their right mind would want that?
[automerge]1586940768[/automerge]

Profits come from making insanely great products.

Which seems to drive some of the haters absolutely crazy. They also are frustrated and upset that Apple has such passionate, satisfied customers. Oh well.

 

[PostApple2016BrainWash]

Honestly, I don’t get your sarcasm. If a device with 7 cores gets so hot, my guess is that a device with 8 graphic cores will get even hotter.

I read Apple had improved the thermal management but I don’t recall anything different from the tear down of the 2020 iPad Pro.

It's negligible and nothing to do with the thermal limit in both models of IPP.

 

[PickUrPoison]

At least we can spect great upgrade for the true 2020 or 2021 model

It ll be even better than the current model, with a faster SoC and a better display. Hopefully not too much of a price increase for the mini-LED display.

 

[ingambe]

I am surprised they don’t offer a unlock service to unlock the extra core on your 2018 iPad Pro model for only 399$

It not how processor manufacturing works
Let's say that 50% have 8 viable core and 30% have only 7 viable core, if you want only the chips with 8 cores, you are going to pay double the price because you will throw away half the batch you produce
So what manufacturer do is pretty simple, they throw away all chips with less than 7 viable cores (20% in this example) and the one with 8 cores got one deactivated (software or by disconnecting one core), the idea is to have a consistent product, imagine you have a 50% chance to have 7 or 8 cores, you would have complained about that too.
So it's not possible to unlock this extra core

 

[PostApple2016BrainWash]

It not how processor manufacturing works
Let's say that 50% have 8 viable core and 30% have only 7 viable core, if you want only the chips with 8 cores, you are going to pay double the price because you will throw away half the batch you produce
So what manufacturer do is pretty simple, they throw away all chips with less than 7 viable cores (20% in this example) and the one with 8 cores got one deactivated (software or by disconnecting one core), the idea is to have a consistent product, imagine you have a 50% chance to have 7 or 8 cores, you would have complained about that too.
So it's not possible to unlock this extra core

The A12Z improvement is worse than any other model ever release by Apple.

 

[EugW]

2) Will the 5th gen, with a speed bump and better display—both of which are really necessary only for a few—really be so much better than the current model? How much extra are you willing to pay for mini-LED backlight technology?

I’m not hugely concerned about the CPU speed but 5G + mini-LED would be worth a couple of hundred bucks to me.

As mentioned before, the 2018 (and presumably 2020) iPad Pro doesn’t have very good black levels. And I say that as a movie and TV watching consumer, not a creative pro. Strangely enough, this drawback is in probably less of a concern for most pros than it is for consumers like me.

Mind you, there’s no guarantee that mini-LED will satisfactorily solve this black level problem. Mini-LED cannot provide OLED-class black levels. It can provide anywhere from a slight improvement to a big improvement, so it will interesting to see where Apple’s implementation falls along that gradient.

Apple actually already has awesome black levels... in the iPhone because they’re OLED. The ironic part for me is I don’t care on the iPhone as I never watch movies and TV on my iPhone.

 

[PickUrPoison]

The A12Z improvement is worse than any other model ever release by Apple.

Hardly. The A5X in the iPad 3 was an incredibly underpowered piece of crap.

The A12Z is a beast. Nothing in any other tablet even comes close. Everyone acknowledges that.

 

[chucker23n1]

Which seems to drive some of the haters absolutely crazy. They also are frustrated and upset that Apple has such passionate, satisfied customers. Oh well.

That person is still bitter because they touched their imaginary MacBook and the CPU was at 100℃, and therefore so, too, was the palm rest.

People are putting an awful lot of black-and-white thinking into their posts. Intel has done poorly for several years; therefore, it will always do poorly. AMD has a few a few chips better than Intel's right now; therefore, all of their chips always will be and always have been better than Intel's. Tim Cook prices a lot of products higher than Steve Jobs did, and hasn't yet had any iPhone-level hit of his own; therefore, he is an unimaginative failure on all accounts who only seeks profit.

Imagine being this simplistic. Must be kind of comforting, I guess.
[automerge]1586946549[/automerge]

The A12Z improvement is worse than any other model ever release by Apple.

The A12X was 33% better in single-core and 101% better in multi-core than the A10X. That's plenty for a few years. The A12Z didn't need to be a big deal. Almost nobody should upgrade from the 2018 to the 2020, but Apple isn't even saying they should. This model is for either AR enthusiasts, or people who don't have the 2018.

On an absolute measure, the A12Z isn't a bad CPU. It's not like the iPad 3's, which just wasn't fit for its purpose.

 

[chucker23n1]

Feels like Apple is starting to go Intel on us.

No, the comparison doesn't hold.

This is a case where Apple skipped one year's improvements (the hypothetical A13X). I'm guessing they'll also skip the A14X and go straight to the A15X, but the rumors seem to say there will, in fact, be an A14X iPad Pro.

But the A12Z they're using, like the A12X before, is already a 7nm CPU. The A13X would also have been a 7nm CPU. A14 will probably be 5nm, and if not, A15 almost certainly will.

So, as far as process goes, they're not really lagging much at all. (This is of course not just on Apple; it's also TSMC and Samsung doing a good job.)

Contrast that to Intel. The original promise was to have 10nm in 2015, which would have been quite good. Instead, Skylake shipped in 2015, then Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, Amber Lake, Cascade Lake, Comet Lake, Cooper Lake (mostly canceled), and soon probably Rocket Lake. Those are all still 14nm, like Broadwell in 2014, and some of them haven't even shipped yet. We'll likely see 14nm all the way in 2021.

On the 10nm front, they shipped Cannon Lake in 2018, several years late, and only at very small volume with a single SKU. It wasn't until Ice Lake in 2019 that things started ramping up, and several Ice Lake models still aren't shipping today.

They won't fully recover from their 10nm disaster until next year, maybe not even until 2022. There's finally a ray of sunshine, with the MacBook Air having 10nm CPUs (and it shows; they're a massive performance leap despite being lower-clocked than before!). But we'll see how that goes.

Intel didn't have just one single SKU that was disappointing. Not one year or two. They had more than half a decade of adding more make-up to their increasingly aging Skylake microarchitecture, because they couldn't figure out the 10nm process in volume. They had to keep making increasingly hard-to-believe presentations with roadmaps as their engineers scrambled to figure out how to fix this.

This situation is nothing like that. You can argue that Apple put the foot off the gas for this model; yeah, they kind of did. But also, they could afford to. Intel cannot afford to do that right now.

 

[FlyingDutch]

No it isn't. Also your comment makes no sense. So it's okay for a product with the moniker of "Pro" to have a chip that's two years old? Please explain to me your logic.

The chip is not two years old (iPad Pro 2018 isn’t even two years old...). The chip is brand new, produced this year and it is just based on the previous SoC, with better yields that allowed for an additional graphic core to be enabled. It still is far better than anything else on the market.
If you have a 2018 iPad Pro, it isn’t advisable to upgrade, unless you don’t think the new camera is a selling point for your needs. Simple like that.
[automerge]1586950415[/automerge]

There’s nothing to “unlock”, nor has there ever been. The problem was the inability to produce the A12X with 8 functional cores at the necessary yield. That problem has been overcome.

There’s no unlocking or enabling that can happen with defective cores, the only thing to be done is to either disable them or trash them. Producing a perfect chip, with no defective GPU cores, is what gives you an A12Z. One defective core and it’s an A12X. Two or more defective cores gives you unusable trash.

Any mischaracterization of this industry standard yield maximization process as “unlocking” or “enabling” cores indicates a profound lack of understanding of the situation.

You nailed it.
People here are bashing Apple without ANY knowledge about the matter

 

[PostApple2016BrainWash]

The chip is not two years old (iPad Pro 2018 isn’t even two years old...). The chip is brand new, produced this year and it is just based on the previous SoC, with better yields that allowed for an additional graphic core to be enabled. It still is far better than anything else on the market.
If you have a 2018 iPad Pro, it isn’t advisable to upgrade, unless you don’t think the new camera is a selling point for your needs. Simple like that.

The chip in early 2020 IPP is brand new but it is almost same as A12X that some people are right to infer as an old SoC from 2018.

 

[GuruZac]

So to get this straight, the A12X is identical to the A12Z other than the Z variant has 1 extra core (8 core vs 7 core in the X variant). Why are people complaining about the 2020? I have a 2018, and I still see the 2020 model as a great release. I’m not upgrading mine but I would love the improvements of the 2020 like the extra RAM and LiDAR/Camera improvements.

 

[PostApple2016BrainWash]

So to get this straight, the A12X is identical to the A12Z other than the Z variant has 1 extra core (8 core vs 7 core in the X variant). Why are people complaining about the 2020? I have a 2018, and I still see the 2020 model as a great release. I’m not upgrading mine but I would love the improvements of the 2020 like the extra RAM and LiDAR/Camera improvements.

It's basically the same SoC from 2018 IPP and the people are not exactly wrong to assert as an old chip with less than 1% differences.

 

[Kal-037]

No, it’s brand new. Not available before. You’ve got to buy the brand new iPad Pro to get it. But it depends on your personal definition of brand new. Whatever. You don’t have to call a faster chip with an increased core count—that’s only been available for a few weeks, and only on the latest iPad Pro models—brand new if you don’t want to... suit yourself 🤷‍♂️

But you’ve got absolutely no response to the main points of my post? You still don’t understand why the 4th gen is so much better than the 3rd gen, and why the 5th gen will be a small upgrade from the 4th?

I can't see anything making the 4th gen "so much better" except RAM. The A12Z has an extra core, yes, does that translate to a massive speed increase? No.
The 4th gen is absolutely an update, but not a great one, by any means. CPU is 0.5%-1% faster while GPU is 8% faster, (that's intel kind of "upgrading") 6GB RAM is great but the 3rd had that with the 1TB (it was more expensive, but that's moot once they dropped the price a few months after releasing the 3rd AND now that the 3rd is on sale everywhere too.) The LiDar scanner is cool and all, but more of a gimmick right now. Did the iPad (a giant huge slab of glass need such a camera? I don't think so, an iPhone would make much more sense.) Then we have WiFi 6, that is just an embarrassment, I have seen and heard many problems with it freezing, going slow/sluggish, or just doesn't work. That could be the software side of course, but until IT IS fixed for all users and devices, that makes it a problem not an improvement or update.
The other issue I've seen and heard about is that the glass of the display is somehow more flexible and not as strong as the 3rd gen. No good Doctor Jones, no good!
*of course some of the points I made are pure opinion, but some are factual... so to me that makes the 4th gen just ever so slightly faster than the 3rd, but it is not enough of a boost to consider it much better upgrade. It's good, but I imagine the 5th gen will actually be more similar to how the 3rd gen was a huge boost from the 2nd.
If the 4th gen is working great for you and is super amazing, that's awesome (and I would never want to dissuade you from enjoying something that you... enjoy.) I'm not saying it is a piece of garbage by any stretch of the imagination, just saying that it's a very modest update to a product that's only real issue was it bending if you weren't responsible with it. 🤷‍♂️
I do agree the A12Z is new, but it isn't exactly a much more superior chip. In numbers and real world usage, it is faster. But is it enough of an increase to make the 3rd gen obsolete or bad or whatever? Not in my opinion.


Kallum.

 

[ingambe]

I can't see anything making the 4th gen "so much better" except RAM. The A12Z has an extra core, yes, does that translate to a massive speed increase? No.
The 4th gen is absolutely an update, but not a great one, by any means. CPU is 0.5%-1% faster while GPU is 8% faster, (that's intel kind of "upgrading") 6GB RAM is great but the 3rd had that with the 1TB (it was more expensive, but that's moot once they dropped the price a few months after releasing the 3rd AND now that the 3rd is on sale everywhere too.) The LiDar scanner is cool and all, but more of a gimmick right now. Did the iPad (a giant huge slab of glass need such a camera? I don't think so, an iPhone would make much more sense.) Then we have WiFi 6, that is just an embarrassment, I have seen and heard many problems with it freezing, going slow/sluggish, or just doesn't work. That could be the software side of course, but until IT IS fixed for all users and devices, that makes it a problem not an improvement or update.
The other issue I've seen and heard about is that the glass of the display is somehow more flexible and not as strong as the 3rd gen. No good Doctor Jones, no good!
*of course some of the points I made are pure opinion, but some are factual... so to me that makes the 4th gen just ever so slightly faster than the 3rd, but it is not enough of a boost to consider it much better upgrade. It's good, but I imagine the 5th gen will actually be more similar to how the red gen. was a huge boost from the 2nd.
If the 4th gen is working great for you and is super amazing, that's awesome (and I would never want to dissuade you from enjoying something that you... enjoy.) I'm not saying it is a piece of garbage by any stretch of the imagination, just saying that it's a very modest update to a product that's only real issue was it bending if you weren't responsible with it. 🤷‍♂️
I do agree the A12Z is new, but it isn't exactly a much more superior chip. In numbers and real world usage, it is faster. But is it enough of an increase to make the 3rd gen obsolete or bad or whatever? Not in my opinion.


Kallum.

Better RAM helps for multitasking which is the real deal, I don’t want the apps to reload that one of my #1 criterion, I don’t really care about benchmark personally
Wifi 6 is a nice update, the camera update is cool too, sometimes I take picture of presentation and annotate them, same for the mic, I record conference and having better audio is really really cool !
128Gb for the base model makes it a viable option for a lot of people which is cool

Why people complains about performance when the performance are enough for 99% of the usage, the A12Z is a cost saving mesure, storage, mics, camera and RAM are expensive, they surely were forced to cust cost here and there, but fortunately it removes nothing compare to the 2018 model