‘Apple A11 soc is made by TSMC at 10nm’

The A11 soc that Apple puts in the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X is made by TSMC on the 10nm process. That says TechInsights based on photos the company has made of the chip. At 89.23mm², the A11 is about thirty percent smaller than the A10.

Despite the smaller size, there are more transistors on the chip. Apple itself announced that there are 4.3 billion. There were 3.3 billion on the A10 soc from the previous generation of iPhones. The A10 was still baked on the 16nm process of TSMC. The new A11-soc contains Apple’s first self-designed GPU and a new chip for accelerating neural calculations.

The A11 isn’t Apple’s first soc to be made using TSMC’s 10nm finfet process; the A10X from the iPad Pro models is also manufactured in this way. With a surface of 96 mm², that chip is slightly larger than the new soc for the iPhones.

In the teardown, TechInsights also examines the iPhone 8 Plus’s camera sensors. According to the measurements, the wide-angle camera has 1.22µm pixels, while the telephoto camera has 1µm pixels. Both cmos sensors would be stacked Exmor RS variants from Sony.