iPhone 11 series runs on A 13 Bionic chips. It is the fastest Central Processing Unit (CPU) ever put into a smart phone. At the same time, considering its graphic capabilities, it is the fastest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Besides, it is very power-efficient. And to cap it all, it is, designed to handle ML and ‘neural networks’.

Let us first understand some electronics and microprocessor design. At Bell Telephone Labs, three physicists invented a transistor in 1948. Their names were William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. They shared the Nobel Prize. A transistor is a small circuit with at least three connections. The circuit uses semi-conductors which allow passage of electric current but with a higher resistance than that of metals. Many such transistors are put together to create integrated circuits (ICs). What we call microprocessors are the ICs which process instructions in a computer or a microwave or a smart TV. They are commonly called chips.

In the 1960s, Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) found that the number of transistors per sq. cm. in ICs was doubling every year. It came to be known as Moore’s Law. It held for a number of years before slowing down.

A13 has 8.5 billion transistors, whereas its forerunner A12 had 6.9 billion transistors. It is thus a huge advance. A13 is a smaller chip physically. Every transistor is about seven nanometres, and there are 10 million nanmetres to a centimetre.

Chips are designed to carry out computer instructions — opening and closing circuits as required. On binary system, Os and 1s are used. 1s allow the passage of current on a live circuit and no current passes on Os. Chip design involves optimisation to process efficiently the type of problems that the computer most commonly handles.

Chip manufacture consists of three differant tasks —

i. hardware design to make it small and physically efficient.

ii. work out most efficient way to solve specific problems — the logical instructions.

iii fabrication of the chip at scale.

Modern computers have CPUS and GPUS. In a smart phone, they are bundled together on the same chip. Very few companies do both chip designing and fabrication, e.g. Intel. Some do just chip design ( fabless manufacturers) e.g. APM. These license out the patents to cellphone and computer makers. There are companies who do fabrication on contract.

Apple has its own in-house chip design department. It also buys some chips for its Macs from Intel. The Bionic series powers its iPhone range. It designs the chips and then contracts out fabrication to Taiwan Semiconductors. A13 is good at image processing. It is power-efficient and enhances battery life. It is optimised to run AI algorithms. It is a gamer’s delight, a game suit called Apple Arcade. Apple TV too had come. Both are bundled into the phone. The four camera set up in iPhone provides feed which can be edited simultaneously.

iPhone 11 has the capacity to splice and edit. It can revolutionise vlogging. It is useful to create new apps

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