Apple Introduces the A17 Pro

Apple introduced the A17 Pro on September 12, 2023, exclusively in the iPhone 15 Pro ($999) and Pro Max ($1,199) — the first time Apple gave a chip a “Pro” designation to distinguish it from the A16 Bionic continuing in the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus. The A17 Pro was built on TSMC’s first-generation 3nm process (N3B, using EUV lithography), containing 19 billion transistors — up from the A16 Bionic’s 16 billion transistors on TSMC’s 4nm node. The A17 Pro’s 6-core CPU delivered 2 high-performance cores (at approximately 3.78 GHz) and 4 efficiency cores; Apple claimed 10% faster CPU performance than A16 while improving power efficiency at similar performance levels.

The 6-core GPU was the A17 Pro’s most significant architectural advance for the marketed use case. Apple added hardware ray tracing — dedicated fixed-function units accelerating ray-triangle intersection calculations and bounding volume hierarchy traversal — bringing a capability from desktop GPUs (NVIDIA’s RTX series since 2018) to a smartphone SoC for the first time. The iPhone 15 Pro also received USB 3 connectivity (10 Gbps), up from the Lightning connector’s USB 2 bandwidth (480 Mbps) and even USB 3 replacement Lightning’s 5 Gbps, enabling ProRes video direct to external SSD in 4K60 with LOG color grading. The 16-core Neural Engine delivered 35 TOPS (versus the A16 Bionic’s 17 TOPS), doubling inference throughput for on-device machine learning tasks including camera computational photography, Autocorrect improvements, and Personal Voice.

Apple used the hardware ray tracing capability to support ports of existing console and PC games: Resident Evil 4 Remake (available at iPhone 15 Pro launch), Resident Evil Village (November 2023), and Assassin’s Creed Mirage (December 2023) each ran as native iPhone applications with GPU ray tracing enabled on supported scene elements. These were technically full PC/console game ports at roughly PS4-equivalent graphical settings running on a 3-watt handheld device, establishing proof that iPhone SoC GPU performance had crossed a threshold sufficient for mainstream game titles. The A17 Pro also added hardware AV1 decode (avoiding the energy cost of software decoding for YouTube’s and Netflix’s AV1 streams) and kept the 48MP main camera with second-generation photonic engine computational pipeline introduced in the A16 generation.