The A17 Pro is Apple's first processor built with TSMC's 3-nanometer process, a new manufacturing technique with smaller features, better performance and higher efficiency. Competitor MediaTek touted its use of TSMC's 3nm process earlier in September, but its Dimensity mobile processor won't reach high-volume manufacturing until 2024. Using new chip manufacturing technologies is a key way to get ahead of rivals, since the new methods accommodate more circuitry elements called transistors and therefore more features. The A17 Pro has 19 billion transistors, up from 16 billion transistors in the A16. For a little historical comparison, the A15 has 15 billion transistors, the A14 11.8 billion and the A13 8.5 billion.
The chip's neural engine, which handles some AI workloads like transcribing speech to text, is up to twice as fast. It can crank out up to 35 trillion operations per second, which is about double last year's 17 TOPS. The extra speed can keep As before, the A17 Pro has six CPU cores, the main brains. That consists of a pair of high-performance cores, now 10% faster than last year, and four efficiency cores. The latter handle much of the phone's work, which doesn't always need top speed but does always need to respect the phone's limited battery capacity. Compared with unnamed rivals, the efficiency cores offer three times more performance per watt, Apple said.
