A17 Pro leak explains why iPhone 15 Pro chip is not as impressive as we were hoping it'd be
After months of leaks, the iPhone 15 Pro and its new A17 Pro chip are finally official. The chip is based on the 3nm manufacturing process, which makes it the most exciting iPhone chip in recent memory. 3nm is the biggest manufacturing technique jump since 2020's 5nm process which was used for the A14 Bionic. But, performance-wise, the A17 Pro doesn't appear to be that big of an improvement over the iPhone 14 Pro's A16 Bionic, and now we presumably know why.
According to information relayed by leaker Revegnus, the A17 Pro's codename suggests that it is basically an improved version of the A16 bionic. The A15 Bionic had the codename H14 and the A16 Bionic was known by the H15 moniker. By that convention, the A17 Pro should be called H16, but it appears to have the codename H15 Coll.
This indicates that the A17 Pro is based on the same architecture as the A16, though that by no means means that no changes have been made. They just don't seem particularly impressive when you consider the fact that this is Apple's first 3nm chip and are mostly limited to cache optimization, clock upgrades, and GPU changes.
TSMC's 3nm tech is said to deliver 15 percent better performance or 35 percent improved power efficiency when compared to the 4nm process which was used for the A16 Bionic.
Apple said that the chip is 10 percent faster than the A16 and did not say anything at all about efficiency improvements, except that it's the most efficient CPU, which implies that efficiency gains aren't worth mentioning. Leaked Geekbench results suggest that the chip is 16 percent faster than the A17 Pro when it comes to single-core performance and 13 percent faster in multi-core performance.
The alleged codename shows that Apple didn't work all that hard on the chip. But given that the A16 was already so speedy, it all makes sense. Most importantly, the A17 Pro is still faster than flagship Android chips and it also helps that the iPhone 15 Pro has more RAM than the iPhone 14 Pro.
The A17 Pro's GPU has six cores, one more than the A16, and Apple claims it offers 20 percent faster graphics performance than its predecessors and is also more energy efficient. The GPU also features hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
The chip's Neural Engine is two times faster, which should result in better machine learning performance. It has 19 billion transistors, 3 billion more than the A16.
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