Apple is using chip-binning to give the new iPad mini a different version of the A17 Pro AP

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. It might be chip-binning which is the repurposing of chips that were defective when produced. Normally, Apple might decide to toss in the trash any defective chips with cores that can’t meet the maximum performance requirements for the iPhone. With chip-binning, the defective cores are deactivated and the chipset is used with fewer cores.

Two different variants of the A17 Pro power the iPhone 15 Pro series and the iPad (A17 Pro) model. |-Cult of Mac

So in this case, with chip-binning, Apple takes what would have been defective chipsets for the iPhone and turns them into a variant of the A17 Pro for the new iPad mini albeit with one less GPU core. This might have had the added effect of saving Apple some money; the iteration of the A17 Pro AP with a 5-core GPU would cost Apple less money to mass produce.

“The new iPad mini gets a major update with A17 Pro, delivering incredible performance and power efficiency in an ultraportable design. A17 Pro is a powerful chip that unlocks a number of improvements over the A15 Bionic in the previous-generation iPad mini. With a 6-core CPU — two performance cores and four efficiency cores — A17 Pro delivers a 30 percent boost in CPU performance.1 A17 Pro also brings a boost in graphics performance with a 5-core GPU, delivering a 25 percent jump over the previous generation.”-Apple

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 on the processors. For example, when the iPad mini 6 was launched in 2021, the A15 Bionic chipset that powered 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 a GPU with five cores. But until Apple reveals the clock speeds for the cores used on either variant of the A17 Pro AP, we will not know for sure.

What is important is that the Apple iPad mini (A17 Pro) will be equipped with 8GB of RAM which means that it can support Apple Intelligence. And most likely, iPad mini (A17 Pro) users will not notice that the A17 Pro AP has one less GPU core even as Apple is able to watch its coffers fill with more money thanks to its use of a less expensive chip-binning strategy.

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