Every year, Apple has released a new A series chip, setting the new benchmark for mobile Silicon. The new releases leave their competitors, the likes of Qualcomm and Samsung, in the dust. This time, with the A12 Bionic, Apple does it again.
Immersive gaming
The iPhone has always been the first to showcase the power of their new silicone. This year has yet again has been an impressive demo by the creators of critically acclaimed titles such as fallout, doom & Skyrim.
The title shown off at the event was the Elder Scrolls: Blades by Bethesda studios. It is best described as Todd put it “it is a massive first-person role-playing game full of stories, quests & and a huge world to explore. ”
One of the main highlights were made in regards to the new graphics processors ability to have advanced lighting. The keynote demonstrates light from the crystals reflect off the water, walls & reflect off the player’s sword which is very challenging.
Some of the in game elements may be hinting at some levels of ray-tracing or hybrid rendering such as DLSS. Both of these are relatively new rendering technologies showcased by Nvidia in the current generation of gpus.
While it may be speculation at this point, we could see the iPhone do some desktop level hybrid ray-tracing in the future.
More Efficiency
Gaming aside, the chip also boasts the new 7-nanometer manufacturing node. This should provide better battery life. Through the new node the team were also able to achieve 50 % better graphics.
Machine Learning
Apple also decided to add eight cores to boost the iPhones machine learning capabilities. This takes it from the six-hundred billion to five-trillion operations per second. That increases the number of operations per second by 8 times!
Fusion performance
The new A12 Bionic also boasts a new six-core fusion setup. There are two performance cores for high-end tasks such as gaming/AR. The remaining four are efficiency cores for using less intensive tasks such as the calculator.
An exciting feature showed off was the Expressive Memoji. The feature would use the neural engine to map over fifty facial muscles. This would reduce the strain on the graphics processor for better overall performance.
Signal Processor
The new image-signal processor on the A12 Bionic chip is supposed to be faster, however, it was not talked about as much at the event.
The Image-Signal processor would be mainly used for bright high-dynamic-range images in portrait mode to emulate DSLR quality on the Iphone.
Conclusion
To wrap up, with the new powerful cores, the A12 bionic focuses on three main areas of improvement compares to the A11. A faster GPU, a new faster image processor and a more powerful neural engine.
We at Absolute Geeks look forward to what the next A series has instore for the next generation!
