It should be noted right away that last year’s iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max run on the Apple A16 without a Pro console. iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max run on Apple A17 Pro. It can be assumed that the company saved the regular A17 versions for the two cheaper versions (iPhone 15 and 15 Plus), but they got the old A16.

Apple A17 Pro: what is known

• As mentioned during the presentation, the new processor is currently produced according to the most advanced technologies and surpasses all previous Apple mobile chips.
• Apple A17 Pro has been assembled 3 nanometer technical process and occurs 19 billion transistorsThey are responsible for processing and storing data.
• The central processor is also two high performance corescores that are 10% more efficient than the cores in the previous generation processor, and four energy-efficient cores that consume three times less power while maintaining the same performance compared to the Apple A16 Bionic.
• The chip also includes: 16-core Neural Engine coprocessorIn particular, it is responsible for running artificial intelligence directly on the device. It can process up to 35 trillion operations per second and supports machine learning, which makes it possible to store personalized data on the device itself, rather than in the cloud.
• To separate The chip in Apple A17 Pro is responsible for working with USB Type-CIt provides data transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second using the USB 3 standard, which is 20 times faster than USB 2.0.
• Apple A17 Pro is also used significantly upgraded video chip. It includes 6 cores that handle graphics with a 20 percent increase and Supports hardware-level ray tracing technology. In this way, the higher quality graphics in the games will enable games such as Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil Village and The Division Resurgence to appear on iOS in the coming months.

Apple claims the A17 Pro provides “4x faster” ray tracing than the A16 Bionic, but the Bionic doesn’t officially support the feature

While Apple doesn’t make a habit of comparing chipsets released a year ago (likely due to a lack of significant differences and a reluctance to disparage last year’s technology that’s still in use), its marketing materials point in a different direction.

According to the source, the A16 Bionic was supposed to have ray tracing function, but Apple engineers gave up on it due to many problems. Technically it’s there, but using it led to serious overheating and performance issues. Therefore, it was decided to disable the feature completely.

With the emergence of official support for ray tracing on the A17 Pro, the company emphasizes that the new SoC is four times faster than the A16 Bionic. It looks like the company has managed to overcome the overheating issue.

The company even showed the tracking study in the presentation. stated that “iPhone 15 Pro uses hardware acceleration of ray tracing for the first time, which is four times faster than software enabling smoother graphics and realistic lighting. The fastest ray tracing performance in a smartphone.”.

In the demo video, the A17 Bionic achieved an impressive 30 frames per second, while another unnamed chip achieved less than 10 frames per second.