- The next generation iPhone Pro will use a new three-nanometer chip process.
- This means faster chips consume less energy.
- Apple may spend this power "budget" on new machine learning features and perhaps better battery life.
The next iPhone Pro will be incredibly powerful, but won't all that potential be wasted?
For years, iPhones have functioned like laptops. Their custom chips can perform trillions of calculations in a second, process your photos in real time, run high-end games, edit videos, and do pretty much anything else you can do. The next iPhone 15 Pro will use a more powerful 3nm chip, but what's the point? The iPhone doesn't need more power.
“The lines between desktops and smartphones are blurring. As phones become more powerful, we may witness a shift towards full mobile computing, reducing our reliance on traditional computers. It’s not just a matter of raw power , and is reshaping the way we perceive and use mobile devices in our daily lives," software engineer Kenneth Jimmy told Lifewire via email.
The iPhone 15 will undergo what’s known as “die shrink.” No, this is not a call from those who hate psychiatrists. It refers to the physical shrinkage of the chip itself, including all the circuitry printed on it. This has some profound implications. Just shrinking the size of the chip can make it run faster and consume less power. Current Apple Silicone chips run on a 5nm or nanometer process. Switching to the 3nm process and reducing the size by almost half will make a big difference. That's before we consider any chip redesigns.
As mentioned before, we don't actually need faster chips. The days when computers struggled to keep up with their software are long gone. But additional power can be budgeted for in different ways.
One can take advantage of all this to extend battery life, for example. If Apple just shrunk the size of the current A16 iPhone system-on-a-chip (SoC) and did nothing else, the phone would run cooler and use significantly less power. But Apple's SoCs are more than just general-purpose chips, like Intel's Core chips. They're custom built to work closely with Apple's software, which is where some of the power budget may be spent.
The A-series SoC contains more than just a CPU. They have special image processing chip engines that enable incredible real-time effects in the camera, including portrait and night modes. Then there's Apple's Neural Engine, which powers Face ID, allows Siri to recognize individual voices, lets the Photos app scan your photos, and identifies faces, plants, landmarks, and soon pets.
Simply put, it performs artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks up to 10,000 times faster than the processing speed of a CPU or GPU (graphics processing unit). Apple may not be using chatbot-style artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence (aka machine learning) is everywhere on iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
Instead of thinking about faster chips letting us do the same old things, just faster, think about them allowing entirely new capabilities. For example, Flash video (the way we used to watch videos on the web) was so bad for battery life that Apple banned its use on iPhones. Instead, it uses special hardware to decode and play videos, which is more power-efficient and paves the way for mobile YouTube and eventually TikTok.
"Ultra-powerful phones pave the way for exciting advancements such as real-time language translation, more realistic virtual reality and AI-driven personalized services. Balancing power consumption with energy efficiency remains the key to extended availability. In In this dynamic, the future holds unlimited potential, Nikita Sherbina, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence software company AIScreen, told Lifewire via email.
Who knows what Apple will have in store for the iPhone 15 Pro and its powerful new A17 chip, but it will use all of this power to do something more than just faster Excel spreadsheet calculations.
"Apple can strategically leverage additional capabilities to enhance artificial intelligence capabilities, improve camera processing, and enable richer augmented reality experiences. This allocation will bring more innovative and valuable features to users," Shelby Na said.
This is the advantage of Apple's integration of software and hardware. It could use it to support entirely new features instead of wasting all that extra speed. We'll have to wait for the iPhone 15's expected fall release to find out what's in store.
