Introducing the Apple A17 Pro: Unleashing Speed and Power

Apple has just made the Apple A17 Pro official. It will be packed inside the Apple iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. The rest of the devices in the lineup get the Apple A16 Bionic, which is the last-gen high-end Apple chipset. Now, before you ask, the Pro naming in the chipset is there for a reason.

Just like Apple explained in its live video, the Apple A17 Pro is the fastest and most powerful mobile chipset yet. And for those wondering, it’s a 3nm chipset with a whopping 19 billion transistors. This advancement in the process and transistor count makes the brand-new Apple A series silicon 20x faster than the predecessor.

Main Highlights of Apple A17 Pro

There’s a lot to talk about the Apple A17 Pro. But among all, these are the main highlights of the chipset:

Robust CPU Configuration

The Apple A17 Pro comes with two high-performance cores. These performance cores are up to 10% faster than the predecessor. What’s more important is that the high-performance cores offer improved branch prediction and wider decode & executing engines. These improvements will result in enhanced raw performance.

But Apple didn’t gear the Apple A17 Pro just to offer the best possible performance. In addition, the chipset is geared to be most power efficient. It comes with four high-efficiency cores, which can deliver three times more performance per watt when compared to the competition.

Enhanced Computational Performance

The Apple A17 Pro comes with 16 Neutral Engine cores. For those wondering, the Neural Engine cores are specialized to execute machine learning and artificial intelligence functions. They were present in the previous A series chipsets. But in the A17 Pro, the Neural Engine cores can offer up to 2 times better performance.

In addition to the Neural Engine cores, the Apple A17 Pro packs dedicated engines. These are for ProRes codec, Pro display engine, and AV1 decoder. All of these will make sure that you have the best possible streaming experience on the new iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.

USB Controller of Apple A17 Pro

As the brand-new iPhone 15 series features a USB-C port, the Apple A17 Pro gets a revamped USB controller. This controller has support for the USB 3 standard, which can offer up to 10 gigabits per second of transfer speed. In addition, it brings faster wired charging and robust USB functions to the new iPhone lineup.

Pro-Class GPU of Apple A17 Pro

The Apple A17 Pro takes GPU performance to the next level with the Pro-class GPU. It comes with six cores with Apple-designed shader architecture. More importantly, the GPU is up to 20% faster than the predecessor, making it a proper step up for gamers.

Other than that, the GPU of the Apple A17 Pro focuses on efficiency, making the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max offer better battery life while handling intensive graphical loads.

Another important thing about the GPU of the A17 Pro is that it comes with Mesh shading. Mesh shaders enhance performance by letting geometry be pre-culled without outputting new index buffers to memory. In simpler words, you get better visuals with mesh shading while gaming on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.

But Wait; There’s More!

As you may know, ray tracing is the next big thing for games. At the core, it’s a rendering technique that can produce incredibly realistic lighting effects. With ray tracing enabled, the game environments seem life-like, all the reflections consider the lighting source, and the games can simulate the physical behavior of light.

Last year, Apple almost enabled the support for ray tracing on the iPhone 14 Pro. But this time, Apple didn’t hold back. With Apple A17 Pro, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max get enhanced ray tracing capabilities. Wondering what makes it so special?

Hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing on Apple A17 Pro

Well, the traditional ray tracing method relies on software-based ray tracing. While this method can definitely offer better visuals than without ray tracing enabled, the performance takes a hit. But the Apple A17 Pro utilizes hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

That not only makes the GPU of the A17 Pro offer better graphical performance but also enhances the visuals. In other words, ray-tracing-enabled games on the iPhone 15 Pro Max will run better and look much better than the competition. And Apple is already working with some of the major game developers to make you get the most out of the GPU.

In the official announcement, Apple showcased how good the ray tracing looks with a demo of the Division Resurgence. And if you asked me, the ray tracing looks very close to how ray tracing-enabled games run on PC.

The Division Resurgence with ray tracing will be coming to the iPhone in early 2024. In addition, Ubisoft will bring one of the latest Assassin’s Creed games to the iPhone. And no, it’s not a mobile port with cut-down visuals. Instead, it will be a proper native port, letting you experience the game just like you would in a beefed-up console.