Leaked A17 chip specs might not tell the whole story

When the iPhone 15 Pro launches next month, the headlines will all talk about the new camera, design, and USB-C port. But the most interesting changes will be under the hood as Apple takes the wraps off its first 3nm processor.

According to a new leak on X (formerly Twitter), the A17 chip will have slightly improved specs compared to the A16 chip. Unknownz21, who has previously leaked accurate information about future iPhones, says the A17 will have very similar specs to the A16 despite the new process:

A17

• CPU cores: 6
• GPU cores: 6
• Clock speed: 3.7GHz
• RAM: 6GB LPDDR5

A16

• CPU cores: 6
• GPU cores: 5
• Clock speed: 3.46GHz
• RAM: 6GB LPDDR5

While it’s hard to know from a spec sheet exactly how fast a chip will be, those numbers don’t suggest a massive leap over the A16. Of course, our iPhones have been fast enough for years, so we didn’t expect much in the way of improved CPU performance beyond the usual 15 percent. An extra GPU core will certainly help on the graphics side, where we are hoping for much bigger gains. However, we’ll have to wait to see more specifics and benchmarks before we make any judgments.

The biggest advantage of the 3nm process is efficiency, and the numbers here don’t speak to those gains. Apple is also expected to feature larger batteries in the iPhone 15 Pro, which could lead to a large leap in battery life.

While Unknownz cautions that 8GB of RAM is “maybe not impossible,” the leaker has “only seen 6GB so far; 8GB seems unlikely.” With 6GB of RAM, it’s less likely that Apple will announce support for higher-end graphics features such as ray tracing acceleration, one of the features we were hoping Apple would announce for the Mac this year. However, the new 6-core GPU architecture may still mean bigger things for the M3, which has reportedly been tested with higher core counts and RAM.

Apple is expected to unveil the A17 processor alongside the iPhone 15 Pro at an Apple event on September 12 or September 13.