Apple’s new [A13 Bionic] chip contains 8.5 billion transistors. Also, there are six CPU cores: Two high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz (called Lightning), and four efficiency cores (called Thunder). It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an octa-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run a trillion operations per second.
This new chip is smarter, faster, and beefier, and yet it somehow manages to consume less power than its predecessor. It’s about 30 percent more efficient than last year’s A12 chip, one of the factors that contributes to the extra five hours per day of battery life in the new iPhones…
Linley Gwennap, the founder of the research consultancy The Linley Group and publisher of the influential Microprocessor Report newsletter, is widely regarded as one of the foremost processor experts… “Although Apple’s cores aren’t the biggest, they continue to lead in mobile performance,” noted Gwennap earlier this year in The Microprocessor Report. And at the time he wrote that, he was talking about the A12 chip. The A13 performs about 20 percent better.
MacDailyNews Take: The Android phone assemblers, every last one of them an iPhone knockoff peddler, cannot compete with the real thing. If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone.
With each passing year… it becomes increasingly clear – even to the Android settlers – that the competition has no chance of even remotely keeping up against Apple’s unmatched vertically integrated one-two punch of custom software and custom hardware. The Android to iPhone upgrade train just turned onto a long straightaway, engines stoked, primed to barrel away! — MacDailyNews, September 13, 2017
I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do. — Steve Jobs, October 12, 2004
To learn about how that vertical integration manifests itself in a chip like the A13 Bionic, Malik sat down with Schiller and AnandTech founder Anand Shimpi who is now part of Apple’s Platform Architecture team. Read the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]