Industry insiders and mobile phone chip experts broke the news that iPhone 16 will be equipped with Apple’s A17 chip. It is reported that Apple’s A17 chip is also based on TSMC’s 3nm process, but it is slightly different from the 3nm used by A17Pro.
access:
Apple Online Store (China)
Specifically, A17Pro uses TSMC's N3B process. Compared with N5 process technology, the logic density of N3B process technology will increase by about 70%, and the speed will increase by 10-15% at the same power consumption, or the power consumption will be reduced by 25-30% at the same speed.
However, TSMC N3B has low yield and high cost, so N3E was created. N3E has fixed various defects on N3B, the design specifications have been relaxed, and the cost is lower, but the performance is not as good as N3B.
Next year’s iPhone 16 will use the N3E process, and its cost is lower than that of the A17 Pro. Apple achieves chip differentiation through different processes. As a result, the gap between the standard version and the Pro version will be further highlighted.
In the past, the standard version of the iPhone and the Pro version used the same chip, and later the standard version used the chip of the previous generation Pro version. The appearance of A17Pro now means that the standard version of iPhone will use a chip with lower performance than the previous generation Pro version.