A12 Bionic Chip Makes iPhone XS Nearly as Fast as High-end Desktop

Apple may have seriously undersold the processing power of the iPhone XS.

After deep diving into the new A12 chip, which is the world’s first 7nm manufactured processor, Anandtech found that the CPU features some big improvements that make it perform way better than just the 15% boost Apple is advertising. It’s nearly as good as a desktop CPU.

A12 Bionic brings big gains

Anandtech found that Apple did a total revamp on the neural accelerator. The cache feature hasn’t seen changes this big since the A7 processor. Big changes were also made to the CPU core and memory compression on the GPU.

“A lot of workloads will be seeing performance improvements I estimate to be around 40%, with even greater improvements in some corner-cases,” writes the site. “Apple’s CPU have gotten so performant now, that we’re just margins off the best desktop CPUs; it will be interesting to see how the coming years evolve, and what this means for Apple’s non-mobile products.”

Different benchmark testings have shown the A12 chip performing between 24% and 28% better than the A11 chip on average.

It could be only a few years before Apple’s custom silicon start to outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in some areas.