Apple A17 Pro: Everything about 3nm-based chip powering iPhone 15 Pro line

Apple says the A17 Pro chip brings major performance upgrades and the biggest redesign in the history of Apple GPUs

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Apple has given the newly launched iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max model a significant performance upgrade with the new A17 Pro processor. The American tech giant unveiled the iPhone 15 Pro lineup at the ‘Wonderlust’ event on September 12, alongside the baseline iPhone 15 series. The new system-on-chip is exclusive to the models in the Pro series. Here are details of the Apple A17 Pro chip:

Fabrication

Apple said the A17 Pro chip is manufactured using a 3nm fabrication process node that allowed it to put over 19 billion transistors on it. It is a significant upgrade over the last generation A16 Bionic chip, which was made on 4nm architecture and had 16 billion transistors. With smaller nanometer chipsets considered to be better, the number of transistors and its size plays an important role in determining chip performance and its power efficiency.

Transistors are the building block of a chip as it regulates current and acts as switch gates to perform basic calculation and processing. The term Nanometer denotes the size of an individual transistor, so smaller the size, more tightly they can be packed together on a chip freeing up more space to add more transistors. More transistors on a small package improves processing performance and power efficiency.

Also Read: Apple iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max: What's new, India pricing, and more

CPU

Apple said the A17 Pro chip gets performance boost by up to 10 per cent compared to the predecessors. The new system-on-chip has a 6-core CPU, which includes two high performance cores and four efficiency cores.

The CPU is responsible for performing logical and input-output operations, by performing calculations and making logical comparisons. The performance cores on a CPU look after heavy tasks while the efficiency cores handle background tasks that do not require much processing.

GPU

For the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), Apple said it has completely redesigned to feature a 6-core GPU on the A17 Pro chip. Apple said the new GPU design will boost the performance by up to 20 per cent while being more power efficient. The GPU on the A17 Pro supports hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing, which is said to enhance the graphics while gaming on the iPhone 15 Pro series smartphones. Ray Tracing technique realistically simulates the lightning in a scene to produce life-like reflections and shadows.

GPU or Graphics Processing Unit acts as a specialised processor designed for graphics rendering and with its rapid processing speeds, it enhances video editing and gaming experience on a device.

USB 3 support

With the new iPhone 15 lineup sporting USB-C port, Apple has opted to add support for USB 3 in the A17 Pro silicon. Apple says that with USB 3 transfer speeds will be 20x faster than USB 2 with speeds up to 10GB/s.