Apple is TSMC’s largest customer. In 2021, 26% of this Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer’s revenue came from Apple; This figure is much higher than the 5.8% from the operations of MediaTek, its second-best customer. The close bond between these two companies Apple will be TSMC’s primary customerand exactly the recently introduced A17 Pro SoC of the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max is the result of this alliance.

This chip was designed by Apple Silicon division engineers based on the A16 Bionic SoC, but fabricated by TSMC on a 3nm extreme ultraviolet (EVU) lithographic node. It is estimated that by 2024, this Taiwanese company’s new factory in Arizona (USA) will be able to produce semiconductors in N5, N5P, N4, N4P and N4X nodes, but 3nm chips will not arrive until 2026, so this is obvious. The A17 Pro SoC is manufactured at TSMC’s facilities in Taiwan.

3nm UVE photolithography is the best feature of the A17 Pro processor

In the table we published below these lines, we have compiled the main features of the A17 Pro and A16 Bionic processors. First of all, there does not seem to be a big difference between these two chips. But this feeling is just a mirage. And as we will see below, Apple introduced: microarchitecture improvements from high-performance CPU cores to high-efficiency cores, as well as GPU cores and Neural Engine cores that are responsible for running artificial intelligence algorithms.

This simply means that the table offers us only part of the information we want to know to intuit what the new iPhone 15 Pro and its Pro Max processor offer us. Regardless, the best feature of these chips is their lithography. The move from the 4nm A16 Bionic SoC to the 3nm A17 Pro will allow the latter to take a step ahead of its predecessor in terms of performance per watt and overall efficiency, but we won’t know for sure until we have a chance to review it beforehand. background.

A17 Pro SoC implements six CPU cores: two high performance and four high efficiency. According to Apple, the first two are up to 10% faster than the equivalent cores of the A16 Bionic processor, thanks to the improvements they’ve implemented in code branch prediction algorithms and instruction decoding and execution engines. These are exactly improvements in microarchitecture I mentioned it a few lines above. On the other hand, according to Apple, high-efficiency cores have higher performance per watt than similar cores in the A16 Bionic chip.

On the other hand, the graphics logic implemented in the new Apple SoC includes 6 cores and is supported by a new shader architecture that, together with other microarchitectural optimizations, makes this GPU 20% faster than the chip’s A16 Bionic. Again we can’t evaluate the performance of this graphical logic until we test it extensively, but it looks really good.

In fact, Apple claims that the ability to accelerate hardware ray tracing average 30 FPS cadence in challenging games. These features will allow the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max to receive versions of the games “Resident Evil Village,” “Resident Evil 4,” “Death Stranding” or “Assassin’s Creed Mirage” in the coming months.

We don’t know in detail how the Neural Engine logic differs from the A17 Pro and A16 Bionic chips, but Apple has confirmed that they both have the same number of cores: 16. Of course, they are not the same. And we know that’s not the case because the A17 Pro chip’s AI engine can perform 35 trillion operations per second, while the A16 Bionic’s can perform close to 17 trillion operations per second. In both cases, these are billions of us, not Anglo-Saxons.

In the next slide we can see that the USB 3 controller logic is implemented within the SoC and not on another chip in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. And that makes sense because this design decision a positive impact on performance By placing the USB logic very close to the CPU cores. In fact, one of the main advantages of SoCs compared to the traditional distribution of functional units in various integrated circuits is that the physical proximity of logical blocks facilitates the implementation of high-performance connections and reduces latency.

What we want users to keep in mind is that only the Pro models implement the USB 3.2 protocol (up to 10 Gbps) via the USB-C connector (apparently, the Lightning connection is definitely gone, as we expected); iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus only have USB 2.0 connectivity (up to 480 Mbps). And that’s a shame. There is no doubt that Apple missed the opportunity to offer the most affordable iPhone 15 with the most advanced physical connectivity.

In the last slide, we can see the physical location within the SoC of the logic responsible for implementing the ProRes and AV1 codecs, as well as the engine that acts as the intermediary between the graphics logic and the display of these iPhones. Unfortunately, Apple has only revealed a few details about it. Microarchitecture of the A17 Pro processorWhat we can tell you for now is what we have collected in this article. We will investigate this chip in more detail once we receive one of the first units of the iPhone 15 Pro.

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