Apple’s A11 Bionic: The Core of Apple’s Competitive Advantage

I’m not the only one, but there aren’t many folks out there who have been pounding the Apple Silicon strategy drum. There are many fascinating elements strategically to these efforts that many people, companies, Apple competitors, etc., take for granted. I’ve argued before that the Apple silicon efforts are one of the core legs of the stool that help them differentiate and separate their products from the herd. If any component supplier in semiconductors or sensors can not meet their needs or deliver on their vision, they simply design what they need themselves. While I want to dig into the A11 Bionic processor itself and the key parts of the new architecture that are relevant, let’s look at the list of components Apple now designs themselves.

• CPU
• GPU
• Display Controller
• Image Processor
• Wifi and Bluetooth modules (in Watch series 3 but expect it to come to other products as well
• Secure Enclave co-processor
• Video encoder co-processor
• Performance processor
• Neural Engine co-processor

I’m sure there are a few I’m leaving out which they didn’t mention, but the list is growing of Apple designed silicon with nearly every product generation. I do not expect Apple’s silicon team to slow down.

Even if we think beyond their proprietary silicon efforts imagine of the other components, they build into the iPhone that they customize with their component partners. The Samsung OLED display is a custom designed panel Apple helped design, and Samsung manufactured. The glass on the front of and the back is a custom design done in partnership with Corning. The lithium ION battery they use is their proprietary battery recipe they created in conjunction with their battery supplier. The camera lens technology they get from Sony and now LG for the True Depth system, is custom designed. When it comes to manufacturing Apple has some proprietary manufacturing processes they created with Foxconn that are unique and exclusive to the iPhone. You can see where I’m going with this. Apple’s level of vertical integration goes down to the most important details of their products. Never have we seen anything like this in consumer electronics.

It is this level of verticalization and attention to detail that got them to be where they are.

A11 Bionic – Fastest and Smartest Chip in the World
Apple claimed that the A11 Bionic is the fastest and smartest chip in the world. We will talk about what it means to be the fastest and then the smartest, but I want to highlight how Apple is starting to discuss the A11 as a brand. Since the beginning of their silicon efforts, you recall Apple used to only refer to their main iPhone and iPad processor as the A(x) processor. They only recently did they start referring to the A10 as Fusion. Apple is taking a play from the playbook from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm by designating a brand to their main chipset and the name changes when the architecture design of the chip changes. In doing this, Apple is telling us the underlying design architecture of the Bionic is new and different from the Fusion. Some may disagree with the branding choice, but honestly, Apple is subtly telling the world they consider their efforts in silicon design on par (I’m sure they feel they are better) with the those like Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm whose main business is to design the worlds best chips for computers and sell them to the world. In short, Apple is saying, our chipset designs are as good as these guys, and they are exclusive to Apple products.

Apple’s silicon efforts are unique. Apple can custom tune the chipset architecture to their needs for iOS in ways no other company can. This is why it is somewhat unfair to compare Apple’s chip designs to those of Qualcomm, Intel, or AMD. These companies have to design chipsets in completely different ways to Apple because they serve a larger market and a broad range of customers. They don’t have the luxury to focus a design on just one device or platform. They also have to pass much more stringent regulation and certification processes because they sell to third parties that Apple does not have to pass. So comparing Apple’s chip performance to Intel or Qualcomm is one of those unfair yet somewhat relevant comparisons.

It is this custom tuning of chipset designs to iOS that I find incredibly compelling for Apple. Think about this one point they made regarding the Bionic architecture. This chip now has six cores there are two performance cores, which means ones to do some heavy lifting, and four efficiency cores for smaller more lightweight tasks. The A10 Fusion had two performance cores and two efficiency cores. The two performance cores on the A11 Bionic are 25% faster than the A10, and the four efficiency cores are 70% faster than the A10. Then we get to this nugget: the second generation Apple designed performance controller (which is the controller they designed to determine how best to utilize all these cores together, intelligently, for efficiency and performance) runs multithreaded workloads 70% faster. While the overall core speed bumps sound great, it is this 70% performance gain in multitasking where you will visibly see a difference in how the OS and apps perform on iPhone 8/Plus and X. This feature alone will cause developers to rejoice because it increases what they can do with their software. One of my favorite lines those of us in semiconductor circles like to use is “The one group who you never need to convince to give them more performance is software developers.”

We also witnessed the debut of Apple’s custom and in house GPU design. I’m still unclear how much Imagination IP is used, as I can’t imagine (no pun intended) it is gone but perhaps diminished. Regardless, Phil Schiller made a comment that is significant about this GPU design. He said it was specifically designed to accelerate 3d games, especially those designed with the new Metal 2 framework. This gives us all the insight we need around Apple’s proprietary silicon efforts. They are designing the chips to perform EVEN BETTER, when you use their proprietary developer frameworks like Metal, Swift, and now ARkit, CoreML, etc. This only deepens their engagement with developers and secures developers into their long term future but also will make the apps and software that run on iOS that much more powerful. This tightly integrated strategy only improves developers chances of making more money with their software which keeps them chomping at the bit to create new software for iOS and not other platforms.

In light of the value proposition I just described, the addition of the A11 Bionic Neural Engine makes complete and total sense. Apple has designed a bit of silicon specifically to run their machine learning tasks for new innovations like FaceTracking, Animoji, and third parties like they did with Snapchat. Giving developers access to the A11 Bionic will again expand the possibilities for software developers for greater opportunity and software innovation.

Every thing Apple designs and customizes from a component standpoint is purpose built for a better experience with their hardware. This makes competing very difficult and the experiences with their products noticeably better to the naked eye and normal consumer. This is why their increasing control of the component designs in nearly every aspect of the iPhone is so significant to their competitive advantage and will be for quite some time.