Apple's branding for its multicore system-on-chip (SoC) starting with the A11 that debuted with the iPhone 8. The Bionic chip has four high-efficiency and two high-performance cores. To save battery life, the efficiency cores are used most of the time. However, when process-intensive tasks such as video playback are activated, the high-end performance cores are used.
Apple Neural Engine
The Bionic SoCs also include a processor dedicated to tasks such as face and speech recognition. Just like the built-in GPU in Apple's A series of SoCs is more efficient for screen rendering, the neural engine is more adept at AI tasks. Hence the Bionic moniker, plus it sounds very high tech. See
bionic,
SoC and
Apple A series.