The Apple A13 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC), designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series. It appears in the iPhone 11, 11 Pro/Pro Max, the iPad (9th generation), the iPhone SE (2nd generation) and the Studio Display. Apple states that the two high performance cores are 20% faster with 30% lower power consumption than the Apple A12's, and the four high efficiency cores are 20% faster with 30% lower power consumption than the A12's.
All iPhones and iPads based on the A13 can be upgraded to iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 via over-the-air (OTA) update. These devices include the iPhone 11 series, the 2nd generation iPhone SE, and the 9th generation iPad.
Design The Apple A13 Bionic features an Apple-designed 64-bit six-core CPU implementing ARMv8.4-A ISA, with two high-performance cores running at 2.65 GHz called Lightning and four energy-efficient cores called Thunder. The Lightning cores feature machine learning accelerators called AMX blocks. Apple claims the AMX blocks are six times faster at matrix multiplication than the Apple A12's Vortex cores. The AMX blocks are capable of up to one trillion single-precision operations per second. The pair of Lightning cores share a 8 MB private L2 cache, while the four Thunder cores share a 4 MB L2. An additional 16 MB system level cache (SLC) serve as a on-chip last level cache, and is accessible to all components across the entire SoC.
The A13 integrates an Apple-designed four-core graphics processing unit (GPU), with 512 FP32 ALUs. Apple claimed the GPU to be 20% faster than its predecessor in the A12, or can alternatively achieve the same performance using 40% less power. A13's eight-core neural network accelerator is claimed to be 20% faster or can achieve the same performance as A12 while consuming 15% less power.
It is manufactured by TSMC on their 2nd generation 7 nm N7P (not to be confused with '7 nm+' or 'N7+'), and contains 8.5 billion transistors.
The A13 has video codec encoding support for HEVC and H.264. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, and Motion JPEG.
+Die block comparison (mm²)SoCA13 (7 nm enhanced)A12 (7 nm)Process nodeTSMC N7PTSMC N7Total die98.4883.27Big core2.612.07Small core0.580.43CPU complex (incl. cores)13.4711.16GPU core3.253.23GPU total15.2814.88NPU4.645.79
Products that include the Apple A13 Bionic iPhone 11 iPhone 11 Pro & 11 Pro Max iPhone SE (2nd generation) iPad (9th generation) Apple Studio Display (first generation)
See also Apple silicon, the range of ARM-based processors designed by Apple Apple M1 Comparison of Armv8-A processors
References