A12Z vs A12X vs A13

Apple has thrown us a curveball this year with the new A12Z Bionic CPU, and although we won’t know for sure what this means until people actually get the new iPad Pro into their hands and start running benchmarks, it’s a safe bet to say that it’s closer in performance to the A12X found in the 2018 iPad Pro than it is to the A13 chips in last year’s iPhone models.

For one thing, the A13 features a “third-generation Neural Engine” which almost certainly hasn’t been brought down to the A12Z, so it seems that the new iPad Pro won’t be as powerful at machine learning and things like computational photography as the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro are, and it’s also unlikely that it includes the “Metal-optimized” GPU of the A13 either.

Still, it may offer better performance in those specific areas where it counts for a tablet device. The A12X in the 2018 iPad Pro was an eight-core chip compared to the six-core A12 and A13, and the A12Z continues that trend, while also offering optimizations for the new LiDAR sensor technology and ARKit applications.