Apple is using chip-binning to create a slightly different variant of the A17 Pro AP for the new iPad mini.
When Apple announced last week that the new iPad mini would be released on October 23rd, it decided to officially give the tablet the iPad mini (A17 Pro) moniker. That’s because the device will be powered by the A17 Pro chipset which is the 3nm SoC that powers the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Or is it? Taking a look at the specs of the A17 Pro AP inside the new iPad mini, one can see that it is not exactly the same chip as the A17 Pro which was the first SoC produced on a 3nm process node to be found inside a smartphone.
The difference between the A17 Pro chipset in the iPhone 15 Pro line and the A17 Pro chipset in the new iPad mini has to do with the number of cores found in the GPU chip. On the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, the A17 Pro has six CPU cores (two performance and four efficiency), a 16-core neural engine (for machine learning tasks), and a six-core GPU. On the new mini iPad, the A17 Pro has the same number of CPU cores, neural engine cores, but will feature only five GPU cores.
Apple might have decided to do this for a couple of reasons.
