Comprehensive analysis of the differences and advantages between A17 Pro and A16 Bionic

Every year at the iPhone launch conference, new chips are also the focus. Unconsciously, the A-series chip has entered the A17 era. This year it is no longer called A17 Bionic, but changed to A17 Pro. For Apple, changing the name is not that casual. Why did the A17 need to be renamed?

The meaning of Bionic

In 2017, Apple released iPhone X, which was the beginning of Apple’s introduction of Face ID, and “Bionic” is actually the word for Marketing. The biometric recognition technology behind it is reminiscent of Face ID/Touch ID. The addition of "Pro" is also just a marketing word, but at this time it was changed. The focus may be on new improvements in GPU, so the name was renamed.

Process technology

The A17 Pro uses a 3nm process, while the A16 Bionic uses a 4nm process. This is the world's first 3nm process chip. The smaller the process, the more transistors can be placed in the same area. The A17 Pro has 19 billion transistors, while the A16 Bionic has 16 billion transistors.

CPU differences

The A17 Pro has the same 6 CPU cores as the A16 Bionic (2 performance cores 4 energy-saving cores), and the A17 Pro is 10% faster than the A16 Bionic in performance cores.

As for the energy-saving core, Apple does not have a concrete data, only that it has 3 times the performance-to-power ratio compared to its competitors. According to the first Geekbench results, the A17 Pro is about 16% faster than the A16 in single-core performance. There is also about a 13% improvement in multi-core performance.

The Neural Engine of the A17 Pro is still 16 cores, but the speed is increased by up to 2 times and can perform up to 35 trillion operations per second. .

Media Engine

This year’s A17 Pro introduces AV1 codec support. This is an important upgrade because AV1 is an efficient video compression standard. You will have a better experience when watching streaming videos that support AV1 format.

RAM

The A17 Pro's RAM has been increased to 8GB from the A16 Bionic's 6GB, which should be more helpful for launching/switching apps quickly.

GPU Performance

The real revolution of A17 Pro is in the GPU. It adopts the new shader architecture designed by Apple. It is the largest design update of Apple GPU to date, and is called Pro-class GPU. Further expanding the possibilities of iPhone.

Apple says they are focused on three things:

– Improving performance and energy efficiency

– Running complex applications

– and add various rendering functions

During the press conference, Apple stated that the A17 Pro has redesigned its GPU, and the number of GPUs in the A17 Pro is 6, which is 1 more than the 5 in the A16 Bionic. . Apple says the new 6-core design of the GPU is 20% faster than the A16 and remains efficient during long gaming sessions.

Apple has added more new gaming features to the GPU, such as mesh shading, allowing games to create more environmental details while consuming less energy.

In addition, Apple has launched for the first time a ray tracing function implemented through hardware acceleration, which is the fastest ray tracing processing speed in today's smartphones. It can more accurately reproduce the behavior of light and reflection of the environment.

Through hardware addition, A17 Pro can run high-definition games very smoothly. The frame rate is significantly higher than software-based ray tracing technology, and is 4 times faster than A16.

Support USB 3

Thanks to the support of the A17 Pro chip, iPhone 15 Pro now also supports USB 3, with a transmission speed of 10Gbps, which is 20 times faster than USB 2 times.

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