Apple A11 Bionic Chip: The Genesis

The Apple A11 Bionic Chip is a 64-bit ARM-based Custom SOC designed by Apple. Apple used this chip on their latest iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X.

It has two high-performance cores which are 25% faster than the Apple A10 and four high-efficiency cores which are up to 70% faster than the energy-efficient cores in the A10.

A11 Bionic Chip Overview:

• 10 nm FinFET Technology
• Microarchitecture: ARMv8-A
• Cores: Hexa-core (2× Monsoon + 4× Mistral)
• L1 cache: 32 KB instruction, 32 KB data
• L2 cache: 8 MB
• GPU: Apple-designed 3 core

A11 Bionic Chip Spec Details:

• The A11 features an Apple-designed 64-bit ARMv8-A six-core CPU.
• The A11 is manufactured by TSMC using a 10 nm FinFET Technology and contains 4.3 billion transistors.
• 2 high-performance cores called Monsoon and 4 energy-efficient cores called Mistral.
• The A11 uses a new second-generation performance controller, which allows using all six cores synchronously.
• Integrated Apple-designed 3-core GPU with 30% faster graphics performance than the A10.
• Embedded M11 motion coprocessor.
• The A11 has neural network hardware that Apple calls a “neural engine”, which can perform up to 600 billion operations per second, used for Face ID, Animoji and AR (Augmented Reality) like more complex tasks.

A11 Bionic Chip Benchmarks:

A recent Geekbench test has confirmed that the iPhone’s new A11 Bionic Chip absolutely outperforms every other Top Tier processor chipsets including Samsung’s Exynos 8895, Huawei Kirin 960 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835.

The report confirms that the new A11 Bionic chip is the fastest among the Current-Gen mobile processor chips with a 4204 single-core score, while its multi-core score on the 6-core chip hit 10165 points.

To put them into perspective, here is the Benchmark score of Samsung Exynos 8895, Kirin 960 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835

If these benchmark performance characteristics hold true in real world use cases than to beat the Apple’s A11 Chip other players must buckle up.

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