Inside Apple’s A13 Bionic system-on-chip

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 past few 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. Maybe the iPhone doesn’t have the fastest cellular speeds in the business, but Apple is determined to make sure that nobody is going to have a faster CPU, GPU, or machine learning acceleration.

The year-old A12 Bionic is