Apple unveiled the revamped iPad Pros alongside an updated MacBook Air last month. Rather than featuring an upgraded version of the A13 SoC found in the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro, the slates feature the A12Z. Offering a very small performance increase over their predecessors, it was suspected that the chip was a re-binned A12X, and now it’s been confirmed.
TechInsights did an analysis of the two chips and found that they are virtually identical. Apple did say that one of the benefits of the A12Z was the addition of an eighth GPU core, as opposed to the A12X’s seven, but it was discovered that the latter SoC actually shipped with eight cores, though one of them was disabled.
Apple didn’t highlight changes to CPU performance, but there is one difference – the A12Z features an 8-core GPU, while the A12X has a 7-core GPU.
At the time, TechInsights said that it planned to conduct a floorplan analysis to determine whether there are any differences between the A12X and the A12Z, which has now been completed, and the GPU chips are the same. A full report on TechInsights findings will be available on its website to those with a subscription.
It is not unusual for chip manufacturers to disable one core of a processor when a chip isn’t meeting yield levels, and that’s perhaps what happened with the A12X. The manufacturing of the chip has now improved enough that yields have gotten better and all 8 cores are functional, resulting in the A12Z chip.
