Apple A12Z Bionic GPU vs Qualcomm Adreno 680 vs Qualcomm Adreno 642

Apple A12Z Bionic GPU

The Apple A12Z Bionic graphics card is the integrated GPU in the Apple A12Z Bionic SoC in the 2020 iPad Pro models. It was designed by Apple and not licensed by PowerVR and should be based on the same architecture as the A12X and A12 GPUs with more cores. The A12Z offer 8 GPU cores, where the older A12X in the 2018 iPad Pro series offered 7. Interestingly, Apple did not choose to create a new variant of the current Apple A13 chip used in the iPhone 11 models.

The architecture should be similar to the older PowerVR graphics cards like the A10 GPU, but currently Apple is not disclosing any information about the architecture.

The performance should be slightly faster than the old iPad pro models and therefore significantly faster than the iPhone SoCs and Android competitors.

The chip should be still manufactured in 7nm at TSMC and offer a very good efficiency.

Qualcomm Adreno 680

The Qualcomm Adreno 680 is an integrated graphics card in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx SoC for Windows laptops. According to Qualcomm it is 2x faster than the previous Adreno 630 in the Snapdragon 850 for Windows PCs with a 60% improved efficiency (thanks to the 7nm process). The performance should be similar to a Intel UHD Graphics 620 (e.g. in a 8th gen Core i5) when running native ARM64 compiled Windows apps and games. Running emulated 32 bit games (64 bit games compiled for AMD/Intel are not supported), the performance is notably slower.

Qualcomm Adreno 642

The Qualcomm Adreno 642 is a smartphone and tablet GPU that is integrated within the Qualcomm Snapdragon 780G SoC. The chip will be available from mid 2021 and will be used mainly in upper mid-range Android devices.

According to Qualcomm, the Adreno 642 GPU offers a 50% improved performance over the Adreno 620, its predecessor, which is integrated in the Snapdragon 768G SoC. This is also thanks to the fast LPDDR4X-4200 memory support of the SoC.

The Adreno 642 supports OpenCL 2.0 FP, OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.1.

The Snapdragon 780G is manufactured in the modern 5nm LPPE process with EUV at Samsung that should provide a good power efficiency.