When Apple revealed its new to us a few days ago iPad mini saying that it will be available on the market from October 23, decided to officially give the tablet the name iPad mini (A17 Pro). This is 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. Is it exactly the same SoC or not? Taking a look at the specifications 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 built on a 3nm process node found inside a smartphone.
The difference between the A17 Pro chipset in the iPhone 15 Pro series and the A17 Pro chipset in the new iPad mini has to do with the number of cores found in the GPU unit. In the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, the A17 Pro has six CPU cores, a 16-core NPU (for machine learning tasks), and a six-core GPU. In the new iPad mini, the A17 Pro has the same number of CPU cores, the same number of cores for the NPU unit, but will only have five GPU cores.
There are two main reasons why Apple decided to do this. It might be το chip-binning which is reusing chips that were defective when they were produced. Normally, Apple may have decided to trash any defective chips with cores that cannot meet the maximum performance requirements for the iPhone. With chip-binning, faulty cores are disabled and the chipset is used with fewer cores.
So in this case, with chip-binning, Apple takes what would be defective iPhone chipsets and turns them into a variant of the A17 Pro for the new iPad mini, albeit with one less GPU core. This may have had the added effect of saving Apple money. iterating the A17 Pro AP with a 5-core GPU would cost Apple less money to mass produce.
Another possible difference between the A17 Pro AP used to power the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max and the A17 Pro AP produced using chip-binning for the iPad mini could be the clock speed of the cores to processors. For example, when the iPad mini 6 was released in 2021, the A15 Bionic chipset powering the device ran at lower clock speeds than the A15 Bionic used with the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max, although both had GPUs with five cores. But until Apple reveals the clock speeds for the cores used in each variant of the A17 Pro AP, we won’t know for sure.
You just keep that the Apple iPad mini (A17 Pro) will be equipped with 8GB of RAM which means it can support Apple Intelligence. And probably, iPad mini (A17 Pro) users won’t notice that the A17 Pro AP has one less GPU core.
Source: myphone.gr
