It's no secret Apple's A-series processors are insanely fast and are one of the core reasons for iPhone's success. The iPhone X is powered by Apple's A11 chipset and is able to churn out exceptional performance, both, practically as well as on benchmarks. 

The soon to come iPhones will surely be powered by Apple's 'A12' processor, carrying on the naming conventions from A10 Fusion or A11 Bionic. The A11 chipset was a big leap in terms of CPU architecture, and the A12 seeks to refine it with a 7nanometer design and further performance and power consumption improvements. 

© Apple

The A11 Bionic found in the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X is produced using TSMC's 10nm manufacturing process on the other hand.

Promising increased performance and decreased power consumption, TSMC says its 7nm process is said to make the A12 chip 20 percent faster than last year's A11 chip and 40 percent more energy-efficient. TSMC is the Taiwanese company that is exclusively responsible for manufacturing Apple's A12 chipset this year. 

© Apple

Apple added a special Neural Engine in the A11, hence the name 'Bionic', we expect Apple to continue refining this further as AI and ML are at the center of the industry right now. It is used for features like Face ID and even the upcoming Kirin 970 contains a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that can perform tasks like image recognition 20 times faster than a CPU. 

© AndroidAuthority

The A11 Bionic processor has already proven that is exceptionally faster than the competing Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset, and with the A12 things will get even more interesting. On paper, Apple uses the same ARM 64-bit architecture that Qualcomm, Samsung, and Huawei use, but Apple has a special license with ARM that lets it design its own chipsets. 

Apple also has the liberty to design the processor exactly the way it wants to, adjustments in cost can be balanced as everything about the iPhone is built in-house. In fact, one reason why the A11 is faster than the Snapdragon 845 is that Apple uses bigger silicon chipsets that are almost twice the size of the competing chipsets.

Source: MacWorld