Apple A15 Bionic vs Apple A17 Pro

Apple A15 Bionic

The Apple A15 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 13 and iPad Mini (2021) models. It was announced late 2021 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. The CPU performance increases only slightly compared to the A14, but GPU (in the higher end models) offers higher gains.

The chip is manufactured in 5nm and integrates 15.8 billion transistors (compared to the 11.8 of the A14).

Apple A17 Pro

The Apple A17 Pro is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 15 Pro (2023) models. It offers 6 cores divided in two performance cores (up to 3.78 GHz) and four power-efficiency cores (up to 2.11 GHz). Thanks to the higher clock speed and improvements of the branch prediction and a wider design, the A17 is able to be around 10% to 15% faster than the A16 SoC.

The biggest improvement is the new integrated 6-core GPU with ray tracing and mesh shading support. Furthermore, the chip is now able to decode AV1 video in hardware and supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps). The Neural Engine still offers 16 cores, but should be up to twice as fast now.

The A17 Pro integrates 19 Billion transistors and is manufactured in the bleeding edge 3nm (N3B) process at TSMC.