Apple A17
The Apple A17 Pro is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series, and manufactured by TSMC. It is used in the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad Mini models and is the first widely available SoC to be built on a 3 nm process. This chip does not have a non-Pro variant, as Apple moved to the TSMC N3E manufacturing node technology and announced the A18 Series on September 9, 2024 through February 19, 2025, with the A18 and the A18 Pro respectively replacing the A15 Bionic, A16 Bionic and the A17 Pro on the new iPhone 16 lineup.
Design
The Apple A17 Pro features an Apple-designed 64-bit ARMv8.6-A six-core CPU with two high-performance cores running at 3.78 GHz, and four energy-efficient cores running at 2.11 GHz. Apple claims the new high-performance cores are 10% faster due to its improved branch prediction, and wider decode & execution engines, also claiming that the new efficiency cores are faster and 3x more efficient than the competition. The amount of RAM has increased from 6 GB to 8 GB.The A17 Pro integrates a new Apple-designed six-core GPU, which Apple claims is 20% faster and their biggest redesign in the history of Apple GPUs, with added hardware accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading support. The 16-core Neural Engine is now capable of 35 trillion operations per second. The A17 Pro also added support for AV1 decoding and USB 3.2 Gen 2. The A17 Pro contains 19 billion transistors, a 19% increase from the A16's transistor count of 16 billion, and is fabricated by TSMC on their 3 nm N3 process.
The A17 Pro is the first SoC used in Apple devices to support hardware decoding of AV1 video.
Neural Processing Unit (NPU)
The A17 Pro's NPU delivers 35 TOPS, which has remained unchanged in the Apple A18. This is approximately 58 times more powerful than the NPU in the A11, which could handle 600 billion operations per second. The A11, introduced in 2017, was the first Apple chip to feature a Neural Engine.| Chip | Power | Year | Power relative to the A17 Pro |
| A11 Bionic | 0.6 | 2017 | 1.71% |
| A12 Bionic | 5.0 | 2018 | 14.29% |
| A13 Bionic | 6.0 | 2019 | 17.14% |
| A14 Bionic | 11.0 | 2020 | 31.43% |
| A15 Bionic | 15.8 | 2021 | 45.14% |
| A16 Bionic | 17.0 | 2022 | 48.57% |
| A17 Pro | 35.0 | 2023 | 100.00% |
Products that include the Apple A17 Pro
- iPhone 15 Pro & 15 Pro Max – 6-core CPU and 6-core GPU
- iPad Mini – 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU
Comparison of A15, A16 and A17