Apple Execs Discuss Development of A11 Bionic Chip Powering the New iPhones
In a new interview with Mashable, Apple’s Johny Srouji and Phill Schiller provide an interesting look at the development of the A11 Bionic chip powering the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8.
Interestingly, Srouji – senior vice president of hardware technologies – said that development of the A11 started three years ago when the iPhone 6 was Apple’s flagship handset.
That three-year roadmap does require room for changes:
“The process is flexible to changes,” said Srouji, who’s been with Apple since the first iPhone. If a team comes in with a request that wasn’t part of the original plan, “We need to make that happen. We don’t say, ‘No, let me get back to my road map and, five years later, I’ll give you something.”
Schiller and Srouji wouldn’t get into specific requests, but Schiller admitted to me, “There have been some critical things in the past few years, where we’ve asked Johny’s team to do something on a different schedule, on a different plan than they had in place for years, and they moved heaven and earth and done it, and it’s remarkable to see.”
The A11 Bionic chip sports two high-performance cores 25 percent faster than the A10, and four high-efficiency cores at 70 percent faster than the previous processor. The system on a chip is 64-bit and includes 4.3 billion transistors with a second-generation performance controller for 70 percent faster multithread workloads.