The A12 chip, the first of the iPhone XS market, gives Apple a big advantage over its competitors

To get an idea of ​​the small size of the electronic elements on the Apple A12 Bionic chip in the heart of the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR, the first look is really hard on a human hair.

It's thin, obviously. But it is still thick enough that you can fit around 10,000 A12 electronic components across its entire width. This miniaturization is a "major breakthrough," Apple marketing director Phil Schiller said on Wednesday, saying the A12 was the first chip in the industry to be manufactured in a 7-nanometer manufacturing process.

A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, so when Apple switched from the 10 nm process of the A11 chip to the 7 nm of A12, the company was able to double the number of circuit elements called transistors in the same surface. In the case of A12, this represents 6.9 billion transistors.

You do not necessarily need to understand the nuances of transistor sizes or how small a nanometer is. The bottom line is that the advancement will allow the iPhone XS and XS Max to run 50% faster graphics than the 2017 iPhone X, while artificial intelligence software will run 8 times faster. And perhaps most importantly, your battery will not run out.

The A12 "is so far ahead of the industry that it will still be competitive with the best Android smartphones in two years, and massively more powerful than low-end phones," said Ben Thompson, an analyst at Stratechery.

The 7-nanometer flea race

Apple considers the 7nm process and the features that it allows as a major benefit.

"The A12 Bionic is the industry's first 7nm chip. It's a major breakthrough," Schiller said at the launch of the iPhone XS. "This A12 Bionic is without doubt the smartest and most powerful chip ever installed on a smartphone."

But Apple won the 7 mile race through the nose.

Huawei, which recently overtook Apple to claim second place in smartphone shipments after Samsung was ranked, will send its Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro phones in October, a few weeks after the arrival of the iPhone. XS and XS Max. Mate models use Huawei's Kirin 980 processor, also built with a 7-nm process.

Qualcomm, which provides processors with many high-end Android phones, today uses the 10-nm processes of chip foundries. Its next generation model, probably called the Snapdragon 855, will be built with 7 nm of manufacturing. We can almost see Apple, who is arguing with Qualcomm, who makes fun of the giant chip mobile.

Such bragging is commonplace in tech circles, but there is a subtext here.

"Apple wants them to have quick access to the latest process," said Kevin Krewell, an analyst at Tirias Research. The move to 7nm manufacturing for years has been difficult, but Apple has the financial means to claim much of the first chips launched by the factories.

Although Apple designs its own chips, it relies on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC) to make them right now. The next-generation Snapdragon prototype chips from Qualcomm are also built by TSMC, but Apple phones will be shipped in millions this month.

The real benefit of the 7nm process is that Apple can do it all without flattening your battery. "Reduced power consumption can extend the life of the battery or allow Apple to increase its performance by 20 percent when the user needs more power," said Linley Group analyst Linley Gwennap.

New brains of AI in the Apple chip A12

The chip industry has been in a panic for more than a decade, as steady progress in ever faster processor clock speeds was becoming more rare. This has forced chip makers to find other ways to improve the quality of chips, because the same software is no longer automatically run faster with each new generation of chips.

Special circuits were one of the main mechanisms of adaptation. First, graphics processing units, or GPUs, that not only accelerate gaming effects like misty air and sparkling chrome, but also physics calculations that make explosions real. Apple's A11 chip had three GPU engines called cores, but the A12 has four.

More recently, chip makers have begun to add chip technology to speed up artificial intelligence tasks. AI, also known as machine learning and neural networks, allows devices to understand voice commands, take better pictures, and recognize unhealthy heart patterns. The integrated circuit of the A12 can perform 5 trillion operations per second, eight times more than the A11.

Control the entire device

Apple is well positioned compared to some competitors because it controls not only the processor, but also the operating system and other software such as voice recognition and photo applications. The company can make sure that all parts of the system work well together.

Google added its own separate AI chip, the Visual Core Pixel, at its phones Pixel 2 in 2017. One of the reasons: the control of the AI ​​system has given Google the flexibility for all software that depend on it, said its engineers at the recent Hot Conference Chips.

But Apple's AI brains are integrated directly into its A12 chip. The technology called the intelligent computing system is "able to analyze the data of the neural network and determine on the fly whether to run it on the processor, the GPU or the neural engine", said Schiller.

Analysts agree that AI is a new key foundation for IT. He will "touch every piece of modern software," Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin said in a research note Thursday. And Apple has the lead with regard to AI in mobile devices.

"Apple is dangerously close to reality," said Bajarin, "and their efforts in machine learning are at the center."

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