Om Malik, Wired:

About 72 minutes into the annual iPhone launch event, Apple senior vice president of marketing Phil Schiller invited Sri Santhanam to come onstage and talk about the brand new A13 Bionic chip found inside all three of the new phones.

And:

By the time Santhanam was done talking, all I could think of were the numbers. Apple’s new chip contains 8.5 billion transistors. Also, there are six CPU cores: Two high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz (called Lightning), and four efficiency cores (called Thunder). It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an octa-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run a trillion operations per second.

This new chip is smarter, faster, and beefier, and yet it somehow manages to consume less power than its predecessor. It’s about 30 percent more efficient than last year’s A12 chip, one of the factors that contributes to the extra five hours per day of battery life in the new iPhones.

And this on the competing chips from Qualcomm, Huawei, and Samsung:

Those chips have some faster components and more of them, so you may think those chips perform better than Apple’s. But the reality is that we hardly use the entire capacity of the chips that come in our mobile devices. One or two high-performance cores are enough for most of what we throw at our phones. Apple’s six-core design might seem lagging compared to the eight-core processors from the competitors, but really, the two big processors on its chip easily outperform its rivals’ designs.

This is a terrific read. No special hardware knowledge required.