Apple Introduces the A17 Pro

Apple introduced the A17 Pro processor with the iPhone 15 Pro in September 2023. It was manufactured on TSMC’s first-generation 3 nm process and included a redesigned GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

The GPU could accelerate ray–triangle intersection calculations directly instead of relying only on shader code. Apple also emphasized faster Neural Engine operations and added AV1 decoding support.

The chip helped Apple position the iPhone as a platform for console-class games, with ports of titles that previously targeted PCs and game consoles. Whether or not that market became large, the hardware showed how smartphone SoCs had evolved into heterogeneous processors capable of graphics, AI, media, and general computing workloads.