Apple A12Z Bionic vs Apple A14 Bionic

While the Apple A12Z has 8 CPU cores, the Apple A14 processor has to get by with 6 cores. However, thanks to the new 5 nm manufacturing technology (TSMC), these are clocked particularly high at up to 3.1 GHz. Both processors rely on Apple's custom ARMv8 architecture, which is based on the big.LITTLE logic.

Processors with big.LITTLE core architecture have, on the one hand, so-called "performance" cores, which have a high level of performance, but also require a correspondingly high amount of energy during operation. In addition, these processors have very energy-saving cores that are not quite as powerful as the "performance" cores.

These cores are usually clocked lower and therefore require significantly less energy. These cores are responsible for background tasks and ensure a long battery life for the device. If necessary, the computing load can also be shared across all cores at the same time, which leads to high multi-core performance.

Apple's A14 Bionic Processor is found in the Apple iPhone 12 (various sizes) and also in the Apple iPhone 12 Pro. The processor is also built into the Apple iPad Air (4th Gen, 2020). Apple's A12Z, on the other hand, is only built into the Apple iPad Pro 2020 and differs from the Apple A12X only in that one more GPU core has been activated.

Apple was able to achieve this through an optimized 7 nm manufacturing process, in which the production yield usually increases over time. The A14 Bionic is Apple's first processor that can decode the new AV1 video codec in hardware. This free video codec is used more and more frequently due to its non-existent license costs and could become the most popular video codec of the current time.

In addition, the A14 can for the first time fall back on LPDDR5-5500 RAM from Samsung, which significantly accelerates read, write and copy processes compared to the LPDDR4X-4266 in the Apple A12Z.