The A17 Bionic will be Apple’s first 3nm processor. This resulted in significant performance and efficiency improvements over the 5nm enrichment used for A14, A15 and A16.
The initial version of the A17 Bionic chip will be manufactured using TSMC’s N3B process, but Apple plans to transition the A17 to the N3E sometime next year. This move is a cost-cutting measure. Based on the N3E, you can create more powerful versions of the processors than on the basis of the N3B.
N3B is a real test production node. It is used to create not very large batch chips and is incompatible with successor processes including N3P, N3X and N3S. This means that Apple will inevitably redesign its future chips to sell ads for TSMC’s upgraded platforms.
Apple is using the N3B based CPU and GPU core for the first A17 chips and then switching to the N3E later in 2024.
It seems unlikely that Apple made such drastic changes to the A17 Bionic during the production run of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, so the standard version of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus could be identified instead of this N3E-based version of the chip.
Source: Iphones RU
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