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Published: September 13, 2017 | Source: Apple | Author: Mark Campbell

Apple’s new A11 Bionic chip delivers a huge performance boost to the iPhone 8 and X

Apple's new A11 Bionic chips delivers a huge performance boost to the iPhone 8 and X

Apple’s new A11 Bionic chip delivers a huge performance boost to the iPhone 8 and X

 
While many are arguing today over the necessity of the iPhone X and enhancements available on the iPhone 8 over the iPhone 7 it must not be understated the number of hardware improvements that are present in Apple’s latest mobile phone designs. 
 
The iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X (Why no iPhone 9?) all contain Apple’s new A11 “Bionic” SoC, which offers some huge performance improvements over the A10 SoC that was available on the iPhone 7. 
 
To start off the SoC is made using a 10nm FinFET manufacturing process (likely TSMC) instead of the 16nm FinFET process that was used to create the A10. Shrinking this SoC down to 10nm has a number of benefits, from enhanced electrical efficiency, a smaller, more compact chip design and the ability to fit more features/transistors into a single chip.  
 
On the CPU side, Apple has fully embraced the multi-core phone era with two high-performance CPU cores and 4 low-power CPU cores. Apple’s A10 chip only featured two performance cores and two low power cores, all of which offer less performance than Apple’s new A10 Bionic design. 
 
Apple has stated that their new performance cores offer 25% more CPU grunt than the performance cores on the A10 with Apple’s latest low-power cores offering a staggering 75% performance boost over the cores used in the A10. 

  

Apple's new A11 Bionic chips delivers a huge performance boost to the iPhone 8 and X

 

Moving on to the A11’s GPU and we can see that this SoC uses Apple’s first custom designed Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), with previous SoCs featuring designs from Imagination Technologies. Surprisingly, given this is Apple’s first production GPU, the company is said to have delivered a 30% performance uplift while adding some additional features.  

These performance boosts will be great for those who use productivity apps on their iPhones, with Apple’s highly specialised/lightweight OS allowing users to squeeze the most performance out of this new hardware.  

 One other noteworthy upgrade is that Apple’s new iPhone models can now record video at up to 4K 60FPS and 1080p video with up to 240FPS refresh rates. This allows videos to be played back at 30FPS at an 8th of its natural speed. 

 

  Apple's new A11 Bionic chips delivers a huge performance boost to the iPhone 8 and X
  

When talking about the iPhone 8 and X’s battery life, Apple stated that the iPhone 8 models will have a similar battery life to their iPhone 7 series counterparts, though the X is said to have a battery life that is 2 hours longer than the iPhone 7. At this time Apple has not confirmed what workload this 2-hour extension applies to, though it is nonetheless welcome. 

While everyone will have their own opinions on the feature set of the iPhone 8 and X it is clear that Apple has delivered some solid performance improvements with their new A11 SoC. It will be interesting to see whether or not Apple can continue delivering similar gains moving forward.    

 

You can join the discussion on Apple’s new A11 Bionic SoC on the OC3D Forums. 

 

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