Since the very first Apple-designed smartphone chip (the A4 back in 2010), the company has been a force to be reckoned with in mobile silicon design. It was with the A6 a couple years later, when Apple used its own CPU design instead of a licensed architecture, that its performance leadership really started to kick into high gear.
For the last several years, Apple’s CPU has really been untouchable. The A11 Bionic featured not only a custom Apple-designed CPU, but finally ditched the PowerVR-based graphics processor for its own custom GPU. In addition, it introduced the Neural Engine, a custom block of silicon separate from the CPU and GPU, focused on accelerating Machine Learning computations.
Since that time, Apple’s mobile silicon has held court over the smartphone chip world.
MacDailyNews Take: The bar is set anew for smartphone SoCs, until Apple’s A14 leaps over it with ease next year!
It’s a damn sexy SoC if you’re into that sort of thing. Too bad Apple can’t do more with it like put it in an enterprise server, for instance. Many companies would have put it into a gaming console and blown away the competition, provided it had a killer game to go with it. Those A-series chips will likely make great OSX laptops with super-long battery life. Imagine an iPhone-sized circuit board in a laptop and all the rest of the space taken up by a battery. Freaking awesome and not impossible to do.
I await the day when GPU, CPU, and Neural Engine are integral parts of one wafer, the GCNe.