Apple A17 Bionic specifications detailed by new leak

With the new iPhone 15 series slated to launch about a month from now (09/08/2023), more information about the smartphones has shown up online. The vanilla iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus will use last year's A16 Bionic SoC, with the cutting-edge iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max (or iPhone 15 Ultra, depending on who you ask) moving on to the Apple A17 Bionic. A new leak has now shed more light on the SoC.

Twitter leaker @URedditor has revealed the Apple A17 Bionic will reuse its predecessor's six-core CPU. A 2+4 split among the performance and efficiency cores seems plausible. The former can boost up to 3.70 GHz, a significant improvement over the A16 Bionic's max clocks of 3.42 GHz. This is likely possible due to the node shift from TSMC N4P to N3B.

The Apple A17 Bionic also packs a 6-core GPU along with 6 GB of LPDDR5 memory from Samsung/Micron. While the lack of memory is disappointing, the extra GPU core could help with better gaming performance. It'll be interesting to see if hardware-based raytracing is supported, something that has been on flagship APs from Qualcomm and MediaTek for a while.

The leaker adds that Apple's strategy of using last-gen chips on non-pro iPhones is here to stay. The A17 Bionic will also power 2024's iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. Performance estimates of the A17 Bionic have been all over the place, but it still has the potential to stay ahead of the stack, given the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's lukewarm Geekbench showing.

Buy the Apple AirPods 2 on Amazon