A11 Bionic

I don't know how reputable Longhorn is but he has been re-tweeted by @_inside and @stroughtonsmith regarding the A11 recently.

In light of the news today about , I think Apple could use the processor as a differentiating factor between the new 2018 models.

• 5.8 in iPhone X successor

• 6.5 in OLED iPhone

• 6.1 in LCD iPhone

I would have assumed all 3 new models would come with the new A12 chip, but now that we are hearing it will use a completely new manufacturing process, and be one of the first mass-produced 7nm chips, I could see Apple only using the A12 in the high-end OLED models, thus using the processor to differentiate the models further (in addition to the screen size/type and other features).

So it could be:

iPhone "?" ($$)

• 5.8" OLED

• A12

• New/improved "Face ID 2"

• New/improved dual camera system

iPhone "?" Plus ($$$)

• 6.5" OLED

• A12

• New/improved "Face ID 2"

• New/improved dual camera system

iPhone "?" ($)

• 6.1 LCD

• A11 Bionic

• Face ID from iPhone X

• Dual camera system from iPhone X

I think Apple will reuse a lot of the components from 2017's iPhone X on the 2018 LCD iPhone in order to save costs of developing new systems, allowing it to be a "cheap" plus sized phone will great internals. The A11 Bionic processor will still allow that iPhone to be competitive processor-wise for at least a year. Still have no clue what they will name these things though.

So what do you think?

edit: formatting

Well... more of a question leading to a discussion then a proper discussion but...

Geekbench seems to have become one of the most important cross plataform benchmarks on the market right now. and if we are to trust its results it would state that a Apple A11 is around 50% of the speed/power/number crunching capability of a Top level Core i3 from intel and can easly surpass an entry level Mobile i3

The geekbench results for a Apple A11 are 4K single core and 11K Multicore,

When it comes to i3, the Entry level I3 7100u that goes in to 400 buck economy laptops is around 3.5K single core and 6.8K Multicore while the top of the crop i3 processor like the 7350K doubles at 9K single core and 18K multicore.

Now you might say "well, Intel processors being Cisc x86 and the apple A11 is a Arm processor, Oranges and apples" but we have learned from the SBC market, largly impulsed by the Raspberry Pi that a Arm processor can go a long way with a Desktop compilation of ubuntu, Raspbian and other distributions that have been ported to Arm processors from Broadcom, Allwinner, Rockchip and Amlogic.

And people are forgetting that Mac OS X Is a Posix/Unix based OS from the BSD branch (Mach kernel) originally written for the IBM 68K successor G series which was then ported to intel X86. the question how hard would it be for apple to port it back to risc (ARM in particular),

Also when looking in to power consumption.

The i3 7100u has a 15Watt TDP and the 7350K has a 60 Watt TDP

Now Apple dosnt release TDP figures but an educated guess looking at battery consuption and benchmarks put it between 2 and 5 Watt TDP, Meaning that even in the worst case senario of 5 Watt TDP, the A11 is getting 50% more performance then a i3 7100u using a third of the power.

and while the i3 7350K doubles the performance of the A11, it consumes 12 times as much power.

Meaning that apple could use a 4 SoC cluster that would consume around 20 watt TDP (note, TDP is the maximum theoretical power consuption of the CPU in lab conditions, it will will not consume that much in day to day use) and could easly exceed the i3 7350K performance for 1/3 the power consumption.

TL;DR : am i getting the numbers wrong or are the days of Intel based Macs numbered ?

Could the computing/processor folks here ELI5 why/how Apple's A11 chip can outperform all the other (Android) ARM based processors ?

I would like to understand the tradeoff that allows the A11 to seemingly wholesomely beat the rest (cost/area/power/process?).

Is there an OS dependence that helps the A11?

Or are they gaming the benchmark system?

Thanks in advance.

I've been a fan of iPhone for a long time now, but at this point in time I'm in a dilemma between Apple and Android. I have an outdated iPhone 6s (locked to StraightTalk, doesn't have any service right now), and received a Christmas gift of 3 years of at&t service for a Samsung A11. The problems I have on switching is 1. All my stuff, my icloud mail, photos, etc is on the iPhone, and 2. I don't like the A11. While the triple-camera, great battery life, and good display is all nice, one thing ruins it all is the processing speed. The thing was slow even when compared to my 6s, and I hardly had any apps on it.

I was wondering, if I had to switch to Android, is there a phone out there that's really snappy, has great processing power, battery life, while also having a budget-friendly cost? Or possibly an Android phone that would make Apple fanboys ditch their iPhones for Android?

Sources: ,

The Apple A12 contains 6,9 billion transistors on a die of 83,3 mm². The density is 82,8 million transistors per mm², 67,4% higher than the 49,1 Mtrans/mm² of the A11. It's 211,3% higher than the 16nm FF process used by the A10, which is only 2 years old.

It will be very interesting what AMD and Nvidia could do given 3x the transistor density of 7nm FF compared to 16nm FF.

This is something I’m quite hyped about. I got excited when they implemented the T2 chip in the iMac pro, which ”is responsible for controlling the iMac Pro’s stereo speakers, internal microphones, and dual cooling fans, all by itself.”

It also makes the Facetime camera a whole lot more intelligent with auto face detection for adjusting white balance and exposure etc.

And think about iPhone Xs new A11 bionic chip, which outperforms lower end MBPs on geekbench. I know that geekbench scores isnt everything but it shows that Apple has the ability to develop extremely high performing high efficiency processing units.

I believe it’s only a matter of time before Apple ditches Intel and goes all self-made product. At least for the Macbook lineups.

This would be awesome in so many ways, not to mention it may mean that prices go down with the reduction in production costs.

1. Apple iPhone 11 - 64.8 million

2. Apple iPhone SE 2020 - 24.2 million

3. Apple iPhone 12 - 23.3 million

4. Samsung Galaxy A51 - 23.2 million

5. Samsung Galaxy A21s - 19.4 million

6. Samsung Galaxy A01 - 16.9 million

7. Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max - 16.8 million

8. Samsung Galaxy A11 - 15.3 million

9. Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro - 15.0 million

10. Apple iPhone 12 mini - 14.5 million

As per rumors A52 has Snapdragon 720G/750G for its 4G/5G variant, 90Hz (4G variant) / 120Hz (5G variant) refresh rate + water and dust resistance.