It’s barely a month until Apple’s big special event of the year, when it reveals its next-generation iPhones and Apple Watches. That’s likely to be on Tuesday, September 12—full details here.
While there have already been leaks about missing protective cases, the inclusion of unprecedented storage, and jaw-dropping display improvements, it’s now becoming clear that the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max could see a blazing-fast increase in performance. Here’s what we think we know, and why it matters.
The increasingly essential leaker Unknownz21 has just tweeted details of the processor, RAM, CPU and GPU for the next Pro phones. They have already revealed some of these details but have now broken them down to make them more accessible. Here’s the tweet and what it means.
Why 3nm Matters
The leaker rightly focuses first on the 3nm manufacturing process used for the A17 chip which will power the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. The smaller the number to the left of the nm, which stands for nanometer, the more you can squeeze on to a processor. The more you can squeeze on, the better. By comparison, the A16 has a 4nm fabrication—and that’s no slouch. The A16 is expected to be in the non-Pro phones, that is, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.
The benefits of 3nm are huge. As Hartley Charlton at MacRumors eloquently put it, “The increased number of transistors that are made possible by 3nm allows the chip to perform more tasks simultaneously and at a faster rate, while using less power.”
Better performance while using less energy means fast, fast, fast results without draining the battery unduly. The perfect storm, then.
More Cores Mean Performance Soars
Forgive me for rhyming. The leak also specifies that the next Pro iPhones will have six cores in the CPU and six in the GPU. That’s compared to the A16 chip (and again, that’s really fast already) which has six cores in the CPU and five in the GPU. That extra core means the system can extract more performance and since it’s a GPU core, and GPU stands for graphics processing unit, it means the next Pro iPhones will likely be capable of much more impressive graphics. Maybe ray-tracing for games? Whatever, it will be a big step up in power.
Performance Speeds
“The two performance cores run at a speed of 3.70Ghz,” the leaker says. The current fastest iPhone performance in the iPhone 14 Pro and will almost certainly be found in the iPhone 15, is 3.46GHz. This indicates faster power coming.
Bigger RAM Possible
This isn’t nailed down yet but it looks possible that the A17 chip will be supported by either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. It’s not clear which, but it’s possible that if the iPhone 15 Pro has a version with 2TB of storage, that 8GB of RAM will be used there.
Why Does Any Of This Matter?
Here’s the thing, Apple never puts components in a device unless it believes it can use them fully, often to the max. Which means that if the leak’s suggested spec improvements come to pass, Apple must have some cool new features up its sleeve to take advantage of them. Exactly what those are will be revealed in less than a month.
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