Not much faster, no more efficient and barely any more transistors.
The web is awash with coverage of Apple’s latest iPhone, with the addition of USB-C grabbing most of the headlines. We’ve touched on the handset’s new graphical prowess, too, with the inclusion of ray tracing and upscaling making for quite the Nvidia-ish feature set.
But for PC gaming, there’s something else inside the new headset that’s far more important. The iPhone 15 Pro is the first device in the world to get TSMC’s new 3nm silicon which is almost certain to be used for AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs. And if the A17 Pro chip is anything to go by, the new TSMC N3 node, as it’s known, isn’t not looking great.
For starters, the A17 Pro’s transistor count bump over its A16 Bionic predecessor is pretty modest. It clocks in at 19 billion where the A16 had 16 billion.
