Everything you need to know about the new Apple A11 processor as tonight's iPhone 8 launch event gets underway.
With every big new iPhone launch comes a namedrop and a quick, flashy 3D look at Apple's latest CPU. For the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, we're expecting the unveiling of the new A11 processor, which by most accounts appears to be a six-core chip.
"Exciting," you think, and indeed it is, but just remember that more cores on a phone isn't the same as more cores on your laptop. Still, let's dive into the new A11 chip to see what Apple might have hiding up its sleeve.
Based on what we have so far – which isn't a huge amount – we know that Apple is doubling down on low-power processing cores in a bid to make the iPhone more power-efficient.
Last year's processor was known as A10 Fusion. This chip design is similar big.LITTLE, created by British company ARM. Without going too in-depth, this is known as 'heterogeneous computing', which is effectively allows devices to run on processors that have cores of different specifications. This unlike a processor in your PC, where all the processor cores are exactly the same.
Big.LITTLE-like designs aren't unique to Apple's chip designs; the likes of the Samsung Exynos 8895 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC feature this sort of architecture. But what's new here is the doubling of the number of lower-power processors. It's hard to tell what this will mean for performance or battery life without Apple revealing a few more details.
The two big cores are known as 'Monsoon' while the four little ones are called 'Mistral'. These are followups from last year's two 'Hurricane' and two 'Zephyr' cores respectively. This year's A10X iPad Pro chip Fusion processors consisted of three Hurricanes and three Mistrals, for reference.
One final nugget of information that could push Apple well beyond the performance of any other chip on the market is that all six cores can actually run in unison. This is a departure from previous designs where only the low power or high power cores can run at the same time. This could potentially mean massive performance gains in certain usage scenarios, such as augmented reality, but we'll need more detail from Apple to understand exactly how this affects how your phone will run.
With heterogeneous computing, it takes a lot of background work for the chip to actually decide which cores should take on each task. This means that Apple will not only have done a lot of work on the hardware side of things, it'll also have done plenty of work on the software side to make sure apps work properly with this new way of doing things. Expect to hear a lot about this – if indeed it's true – after tonight's big event.
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