this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Peculiar to see that there is an iPhone 15 Pro chip in another, new device. Wasn’t the industry consensus that Apple wanted to move on from the costly first generation N3 node as quickly as possible? For the Mx chips, everything seemed like the M3 generation (also on first gen N3) was just a very shortlived in between stopgap solution with everything seemingly shifting to M4.
I was surprised until I saw the spec sheet. The A17 Pro in the iPad mini has a 5-core GPU as opposed to the 6-core GPU the iPhone 15 Pro has with the chip.
So the iPad mini features a binned version of the A17 Pro chip, and Apple likely has quite a few of them piled up as they only ever sold fully functional A17 Pro chips so far. The N3B process didn't have the best of yields to chips with partial defects would've likely been quite common.
Combine that with the likely lower volume sales of the mini compared to larger iPads (and obviously iPhones) and Apple can probably sell the mini for a couple of years without needing to produce new A17 Pro chips.
So it actually makes a lot of sense. Makes me wonder what they'll put in the next regular iPad though.
Probably their way to get rid of extra stock.
This is it. The Pro in this new Mini has a disabled GPU core. They’re offloading low-binned leftover chips.