Early benchmarks of the 2020 iPad Pro have indicated that the performance of the new tablet’s A12Z Bionic processor is only slightly better than that of the 2018 iPad Pro’s A12X Bionic chip. A report from Notebook Check suggests there are only minimal differences when the new chip is compared to the A12X Bionic processor.
Apple mentions in its press release for the release of the 2020 iPad Pro that the new tablet’s A12Z Bionic processor boasts an eighth GPU core. The Notebook Check report says it has confirmed that the A12X Bionic processor also features 8 GPU cores, but the eighth core is disabled. This indicated Apple simply enabled the eighth core to create the A12Z Bionic processor.
Notebook Check explains:
Essentially what this means is that, the A12X and A12Z are the same physical chip (pending the results of the A12Z floorplan analysis) with the same physical number of CPU and GPU cores. Anandtech feels that the A12Z could, in fact, be a re-binned variant of the A12X.
As suggested in the report, it’s possible Apple didn’t want to go to all the trouble of developing a new A13X processor for the spring iPad Pro update. Numerous reports have suggested Apple will release another iPad Pro revision in the fall, which could feature an A14X processor.