The iPhone 15 lineup is still several months away, but there are already plenty of rumors circulating about Apple's upcoming smartphone.
The high-end model of the iPhone 15 lineup will have the A17 Bionic chip, and according to reports, it could be 35 percent more efficient compared to the current iPhone processor. This is all thanks to the use of the newer 3nm chip process technology.
A Newer 3nm Chip is Expected to Give Better Performance
According to BGR, the newer 3nm chip will give better performance while consuming less battery power resulting in longer battery life for the high-end iPhone 15 models.
Considering what iPhone 14 Pro lineup offers right now, battery life seems like the more important upgrade from the A17 Bionic chip.
Since new-generation smartphones are expected to be more efficient than their predecessors, we expect the new chip in the iPhone 15 to bring better battery life to the device.
This 2023, Apple is expected to adopt the upgraded 3nm process technology for the upcoming iPhone chip, the A17 Bionic, according to MacRumors.
Currently, high-end iPhone 14 models are equipped with an A16 Bionic chip that uses TSMC's 4nm process. This offers improved efficiency and performance than the A15 Bionic chip, which is based on the 5nm process from the year prior.
Apple's move to 3nm is a huge step for the tech company. While Apple refers to the A16 chip as a 4nm chip, TSMC actually describes the N4 process used for the said processor as an enhanced version of 5nm. Thus, it means jumping directly from 5nm to 3nm.
More power comes with each new process generation. Typically, as Apple's chip design aims to provide both performance and power, there is a need to balance performance and power consumption.
TSMC Starts Mass Production of 3nm Last Week
Last week, the mass production of TSMC's 3nm process began. According to MacRumors, TSMC's chairman Mark Liu said that the newer process will require 35 percent less power while also providing better performance than its previous 5nm process.
It is expected that Apple will be TSMC's biggest customer of the 3nm process. The said chip will be reportedly used for the upcoming M2 Pro and M2 Max chips as well as for the A17 Bionic for the iPhone 15 Pro lineup.
In a report released earlier, new challenges Apple faced while developing the A16 Bionic chip for the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max were revealed.
Based on the report, the tech company has plans to further improve the GPU on the chip by including ray tracing for the A16 Bionic's GPU.
However, those plans did not materialize after the chip overheated, leading to poor battery life. Because of what happened, Apple changed plans and included a GPU based on last year's A15 Bionic chip instead.
Given this, we could be seeing more considerable improvements with the A17 Bionic chip on high-end iPhone 15 models next year.
As of writing, details on the iPhone 15 and higher-end iPhone 15 Pro and possibly iPhone 15 "Ultra" are limited.
However, rumors suggest that we can expect improvements in the cameras, including a periscope lens. Moreover, we can also expect the expansion of Dynamic Island to all models of the lineup.
Related Article: iPhone 15 Pro with USB-C Will Get Higher-Speed Data Transfers - Kuo
