iPhone X could pack a hexa-core processor

A leak of a Gold Master build of iOS 11 from within Cupertino has seen a slew of details allegedly revealed about Apple’s next-generation iPhones over the weekend. Due to be officially revealed on September 12, the leaks indicate that the current iPhone 7 and 7 Plus upgrade will be known as the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus respectively while the flagship 5.8-inch OLED display model will be called the iPhone X. The latest clue from a close review of the leaked code also suggests that all the new iPhone models will be powered by a six-core processor.

Twitter user Longhorn who made the discovery also suggests that the “A11 Fusion” will feature two high-power cores and four low-power cores in an ARM big.LITTLE configuration. The most recent chip from Apple is the A10X that is found in its iPad Pro models. This is also a hexa-core design in big.LITTLE configuration, but it features three high-power cores and three low-power cores. It remains possible that Apple could go with this approach for the A11 chip. Like the A10X chip, it is also expected that the Apple A11 Fusion chip will fabricated on TSMC’s 10nm FinFet process.

The A10 Fusion chip found in the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus is a 2+2 design that is also built using ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. In this instance two high-power cores clocked at 2.38 GHz do the heavy lifting while two low-power cores keep things ticking over to save battery life for less processor intensive tasks. The 10 Fusion, however, was built on TSMC’s older 16nm process meaning that Apple could conceivably more than double the number of transistors from 3.3 billion found on A10 Fusion for the A11 Fusion in moving to a 10nm FinFet process.

All will soon be revealed by Apple with its press event from the Steve Jobs Theater just a day or two away.