Apple’s new iPhones will be powered by an all new chip, the
A11 Bionic. As usual, the chip smokes the competition and yet again raises the
bar as far as performance is concerned.
The A11 Bionic chip is the first hexa-core chip from Apple,
though in some ways, one might even consider it a 10-core chip. Details are
scant, but the little that we’ve gathered from Apple’s announcements and leaked
information tells us that the chip features a 6-core CPU, a 3-core GPU and an
M11 motion co-processor.
The 6-core CPU comprises of 2x high-performance cores and 4x
energy-efficiency cores. This is two more than on the previous generation. The
GPU, which handles all the graphics processing tasks, is the first graphics
chip that Apple has designed. Previously, Apple used GPUs from Imagination
Technologies. When news broke that Apple would no longer use Imagination
Technologies’ chips, the company’s stocks fell by 70 percent and it’s now up
for sale.
The information we’ve found so far suggests that the A11
Bionic uses 64-bit ARM cores that use the ARM v8-A instruction set. These are
said to be TSMC-built 10 nm chips. The previous A10 chip was built on a 16 nm
process, meaning that the A11 is far more efficient. The 10 nm process also
means that the chip can be clocked higher, resulting in higher performance.
The idea of using high-performance cores in conjunction with
low-performance is not new. In fact, it’s the cornerstone of mobile chipset
design today. ARM popularised it as the big.LITTLE architecture, where
high-performance cores kick in for demanding tasks, leaving routine and less
demanding tasks to the energy-efficiency cores. This results in tremendous
power savings.
Apple appears to have changed things up a bit, however. The
company is apparently using a second-generation controller that permits the
usage of all six cores simultaneously, resulting in even higher performance.
Judging by the architecture of the A10 chips from the iPhone 7 Plus, this is a
design that makes sense for Apple as the cores can share memory directly with
each other, reducing latency and improving performance.
According to Apple, the CPU is 25 percent faster than the
A10 and the GPU is 30 percent faster. Apple also claims that the performance
cores are 25 percent faster than their counterparts on the A10, and that the
energy-efficiency cores are 70 percent faster than their counterparts.
The idea of using high-performance cores in conjunction with
low-performance is not new. In fact, it’s the cornerstone of mobile chipset
design today. ARM popularised it as the big.LITTLE architecture, where
high-performance cores kick in for demanding tasks, leaving routine and less
demanding tasks to the energy-efficiency cores. This results in tremendous
power savings.
According to Apple, the CPU is 25 percent faster than the
A10 and the GPU is 30 percent faster. Apple also claims that the performance
cores are 25 percent faster than their counterparts on the A10, and that the
energy-efficiency cores are 70 percent faster than their counterparts.
In total, the A11 Bionic chip is made up of over 4.3 billion
transistors.
For comparison, the previous generation A10 chip housed
around 3.3 billion transistors and one of Android’s best processing platforms,
the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, is home to 3 billion.
We’re not electronics engineers so we can’t comment on
whether the maxim, “bigger is better” applies here, but initial benchmark
figures certainly reaffirm that notion.
Looking at Geekbench 4 scores, the A11 Bionic simply
thrashes the competition from every competing mobile device on the market
except Apple’s own 10.5-inch iPad Pro. Android-powered devices like the Samsung
Galaxy S8+ aren’t even comparable.
This helpful chart we’ve compiled from Geekbench 4 data
(actual data, not leaks and rumours) should give you a fair idea of what to
expect from the new iPhones.
