As a small production, he notes, money was tight. “We can’t afford to get shut down and start again and get shut down and start again. We decided to create a true bubble and we moved all the cast and crew into the hotel,” he says. After quarantining for a week, cast and crew members needed three negative tests before they were allowed to restart production.
“Making movies in 2020 is not for the faint of heart,” O’Grady says. “But it’s possible.”
The A12Z Bionic is Apple’s third offering in the A12 series of system-on-chips designed by the company. From its origins of being a mobile-centric processor, the A12Z has become important to the future of the company. It was the first A-series chip to be used as the processor in Mac developer kits.
- Introduced in 2020
- 8 core CPU, 8 core GPU
- 2.49GHz clock speed
- Produced with 7nm process
- First used in 2020 iPad Pro
- Used in Mac development kits
First revealed in the 2020 version of the iPad Pro, the A12Z Bionic is Apple’s latest A12-series processor. As a system-on-chip, it is more than just a processor, as it handles graphical duties as part of its architecture and processing.
It is a 64-bit ARM-based chip designed by Apple and features eight computing cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. This consists of four Vortex cores as the “big” performance-focused cores, alongside four high-efficiency Tempest cores that conserve power. It has a maximum clock speed of 2.49GHz.
Onboard, it has 128KB of L1 cache for instructions, 128KB for data, and an 8-megabyte L2 cache. The cache level remains unchanged since the introduction of the A12.
The 2020 iPad Pro was the first to use the A12Z Bionic.
Graphics processing is performed by a collection of eight GPU cores, the highest number offered on an A-series chip. It also has an embedded M12 coprocessor, used to collect and process sensor data. This reduces the central processing unit’s workload.
Dedicated neural network elements in the chip power Apple’s Neural Engine, consisting of eight cores and performing up to 5 trillion 8-bit operations per second. The Neural Engine powers the machine learning functions and advanced computationally intensive features of apps.
TSMC, a long-time Apple partner, manufactures the A12Z under contract. It uses a 7-nanometer process. For the iPad Pro, the chip also has 6 gigabytes of memory installed on the SoC.
At the time of the iPad Pro launch, Apple claimed the A12Z had the “highest performance ever in an iPad,” thanks to the extra GPU, as well as an enhanced thermal architecture and tuned performance controllers.
