Early this month Apple has launched three new iPhone models dubbed iPhone XR, iPhone XS , iPhone XS Max and all these devices were powered by the Apple's new A12 Bionic SoC which was manufactured using TSMC's 7nm process. At the launch event Apple has claimed a lot of performance improvement on the A12 over the A11 Bionic and now today a new report has revealed that suggest the new A12 Bionic chipset actually features more transistors/sqmm than its predecessor A11 Bionic .
According to the report, last year's A11 Bionic from Apple carries a transistor density of 49 million transistors/square mm, while the new A12 Bionic chipset is having a smaller transistors and more compact design with 83.9 million transistors/sqmm, which actually means that the new A12 Bionic SoC features 70% more transistor per sqmm when compared with A11. Moreover, there are 6.9 billion transistors inside the A12 and these additional transistors inside Apple's newest chipset will make it more powerful and energy efficient than its predecessor.
It seems currently that the 2018 iPhones will be the only smartphones that are powered by a 7nm A12 SoC this year, while the last year's A11 Bionic chipset has a 10nm architecture. However, the modem used in the new chipset is from Intel, but Qualcomm was the sole supplier of this component for Apple from 2011 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2017 both Qualcomm and Intel modem chips were employed on the Apple handsets. Meanwhile a latest report suggest that Qualcomm has accused Apple for stealing trade secrets related to its modem chips, and turning the information over to Intel. Now Intel being an exclusive supplier of modem chips for the 2018 iPhones and rumors have suggested that Apple is developing their own modem chipset which could feature in 2020 iPhone models with 5G support.