1 Big Apple Inc. A11 Bionic Chip Mystery Revealed

During Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) Sept. 12 product launch event, the company revealed an interesting detail about its custom-designed A11 Bionic chip that's at the heart of every iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X: transistor count. Apple told the world the A11 Bionic chip is made up of 4.3 billion transistors -- about a billion more than what the company's prior-generation A10 Fusion chip packed.

Thanks to a new 10nm chip manufacturing technology, each transistor in the A11 Bionic chip takes up less area than a transistor in the A10 Fusion did, which was built on a 16nm technology -- roughly half as much, if you believe the marketing claims from the manufacturer of Apple's A10 Fusion and A11 Bionic chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM).

Based on those claims, as well as the transistor density of another mobile chip built using the same technology that's used to build the A11 Bionic, I estimated that the A11 Bionic chip size would measure at around 78 square millimeters.

Source: Fool.com