Apple has unveiled the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, featuring a strong and lightweight titanium design, powerful camera upgrades, and the A17 Pro chip for enhanced performance and mobile gaming.
Apple's Wonderlust event showcased the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip, enabling console-quality gaming with titles like Resident Evil Village and Death Stranding available on the mobile platform for the first time.
The first Geekbench scores for the iPhone 15 Pro have confirmed Apple's claims of improved performance with its new A17 Pro chip, including faster CPU and GPU performance and increased RAM compared to last year's models.
The Apple A17 Pro SoC, the world's first commercially available 3 nm smartphone SoC, has only shown marginal improvements in performance compared to its predecessor, with a 10% increase in single-core performance and 5% increase in multi-core, suggesting that Apple may have had to reduce its performance due to certain issues with TSMC's N3E node.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max experiences substantial thermal throttling and overheating during intensive tasks like gaming, potentially indicating insufficient thermal headroom or similarities between the A17 Pro and A16 Bionic chips.
The leaked benchmark scores suggest that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip will have impressive gaming performance and a strong CPU, potentially surpassing Apple's A17 Pro in these areas.
Apple plans to use a lower-cost manufacturing process, known as the N3E process, for the A17 chip in the standard iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus models in 2024, marking the first time Apple will design a chip specifically for its standard iPhone models.
All four models of the iPhone 16 are expected to be equipped with A18-branded chips, marking a significant jump from the A16 chip used in the current iPhone 15 models, according to analyst Jeff Pu, who covers companies within Apple's supply chain.
Samsung's upcoming Exynos 2400 chipset is predicted to be significantly less powerful than Apple's A17 Pro chipset, as well as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, highlighting Samsung's ongoing struggle to match the performance of its competitors.