AI System-on-Chip (SoC) · serves as: Embedded main processor, AI acceleration, Compute, Computer vision processing.
Which group Apple A11 Bionic belongs to and how it is built
Covers integrated System-on-Chip circuits used as central processing units in embedded systems, robotics, AIoT, and edge AI devices. In this schema, parentCategory is set to 'other' because the parentCategory enum does not include a compute category.
Component type encompassing System-on-Chip designs used as primary compute units in embedded devices, edge AI, and robotics applications.
A single semiconductor component integrating CPU, GPU, AI accelerators, memory controllers, multimedia engines, and communication interfaces.
Basic physical properties of Apple A11 Bionic — dimensions, weight and materials
Apple A11 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) designed by Apple and manufactured by TSMC on a 10 nm FinFET process (TSMC 10FF). It contains 4.3 billion transistors on an 87.66 mm² silicon die — 30% smaller than its predecessor A10 Fusion. Introduced on September 12, 2017 and used exclusively in the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X. Discontinued on April 15, 2020 when Apple stopped selling the iPhone 8/8 Plus.
The CPU architecture is a six-core big.LITTLE ARMv8.2-A design: 2 high-performance Monsoon cores (7-wide decode, out-of-order superscalar) clocked up to 2.38 GHz — 25% faster than A10 — and 4 energy-efficient Mistral cores (3-wide decode, out-of-order superscalar) — up to 70% faster than the equivalent A10 cores. A new second-generation performance controller lets A11 use all six cores simultaneously — something A10 could not do. Cache: L1 64 KB instruction + 64 KB data, L2 8 MB.
The Apple-designed GPU is a three-core unit with 30% higher graphics performance than A10. The chip integrates an embedded M11 motion coprocessor and a new image processor supporting computational photography (lighting estimation, wide color capture, advanced pixel processing).
Most important historical first: A11 is the first Apple chip with a dedicated Neural Engine — a neural-network accelerator performing up to 600 billion operations per second. The Neural Engine powered Face ID (biometric authentication introduced in the iPhone X), Animoji and other machine-learning tasks. The NPU block occupied 1.83 mm² on the die. It was a key element of Apple's on-device AI strategy, though in A11 it was not accessible to third-party apps.
Package: package-on-package (PoP) with 2 GB of LPDDR4X in the iPhone 8, and 3 GB in the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X. Codec support: HEVC/H.264 (encoding), HEVC/H.264/MPEG-4 Part 2/Motion JPEG (decoding). The last supported software update for A11 devices was iOS 16.7.15, released on March 11, 2026. Successor: Apple A12 Bionic.
