The Apple A processors are intended exclusively for so-called smart devices, e.g. smartphones or tablets. Older versions are also installed in the AppleTV. The Apple A processors are Apple's own development, but are essentially based on a current ARM design and therefore also use the ARM64 instruction set.ARM processors are found in almost every current smartphone, but Apple has adapted its processors extremely, so that for many years they have usually been clearly superior to the competing products, at least in the single-core area.Since the 11th generation of the Apple A series, they have had the addition "Bionic" in their name, as Apple has built its own logic areas for artificial intelligence and machine learning into the processors. In certain application areas, the Apple A processors offer extremely high performance, which in the single-core area achieves a performance similar to that of processors for notebooks. This is really remarkable due to the rather low TDP. In the multi-core benchmarks, however, the processors then have to admit defeat to larger processors.The current Apple A processors have at least 6 CPU cores, in smartphones (Apple iPhone) Apple uses a hybrid structure of 2 fast CPU cores paired with 4 small and economical CPU cores. Until 2019, Apple relied on upgraded Apple A processors with 8 CPU cores (4x large and 4x small) in tablets, but these processors are now being replaced by Apple M processors, so the latest Apple iPad is already based on the Apple M1 processor .The internal graphics of the Apple A processors are also impressive and calculate in the example of the Apple A15 with 5 GPU cores with 1.5 TFLOP/s with FP32 floating point calculations. This is very fast and is on par with mid-range notebooks. However, the performance of the CPU and GPU in a small smartphone is limited by the passive cooling and the small cooling surface.
