Apple revealed two new iPhones Tuesday to exorbitant fanfare and alongside it debuted the new chip that will be powering Apple's mobile products for the next year or so: the A8 chip. Let's see what we know about the brains under the hood.

In classic Apple fashion, the Cupertino giant did not reveal specifics about the chip, instead choosing to focus on percentage increases and huge numbers to inspire awe. Still, the chip looks impressive, and given the technical demos shown at the reveal event, the A8 chip should make for noticeable improvements. All the little tweaks Apple hints are inside the A8 allow the chip to be up to 50 times faster than the original iPhone in terms of CPU performance, and up to 84 times faster when it comes to GPU performance.

For starters the A8 chip features 64-bit support. Keep in mind that this isn't the first 64-bit chip in an iPhone as that distinction goes to the last year's A7 chip found in the iPhone 5s (also the first 64-bit chip to be used in a smartphone or tablet). The A8 is built off second-generation desktop architecture.

Apple claims, "The all-new A8 chip is our fastest yet. Its CPU and graphics performance are faster than on the A7 chip, even while powering a larger display and incredible new features. And because it's designed to be so power efficient, the A8 chip can sustain higher performance -- so you can play graphics-intensive games or enjoy video at higher frame rates for longer than ever."

The new A8 chip houses a whopping 2 billion transistors despite its miniscule 20-nanometer process. For those interested, this is more than Intel's desktop Haswell chips. The smaller size also means the A8 chip is more energy efficient than the A7 by about 50 percent. With the A8 chip, Apple claims iPhone 6 users will get up to 50 hours of audio time, up to 11 hours of HD video, up to 11 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, and up to 10 hours of LTE browsing. iPhone 6 Plus users can claim up to 80 hours of audio, up to 14 hours of HD video, up to 12 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, and up to 12 hours of LTE browsing.

The performance increases suggest that the A8 will retain the dual-core identity of the A7 and there is no indication that there will be more than 1GB RAM. These numbers seem smaller than Samsung's eight cores or Android smartphones with up to 3GB RAM, but Apple has repeatedly proven itself in the efficiency department. Until the new iPhones release, however, it'll be hard to tell.

You can find out more about the new iPhones here.