Inside the iPhone 15 Pro is the A17 Pro chipset, which looks to be the new pinnacle of smartphone chips. However, the source of the leak, Revegnus, has evidence (albeit via an unnamed Weibo source) that this chip is actually a bit disappointing.

This is based on Apple's alleged codenames for various processors. For example, H15 represents the A16 chipset found in the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus (and last year's iPhone 14 Pro). However, the codename for the A17 Pro is not H16, as would be expected from this pattern, but instead is "H15 Coll." This suggests that the new chip may be an A16 Pro rather than a new A17 generation chip.

As Revegnus says: "The A17 Pro may be essentially based on the A16 architecture, with optimized caches, clock upgrades, and additional GPU cores.

The codename, and the codename discovered by an unnamed Weibo user, is not conclusive evidence that Apple is shortchanging users on the performance of the new chip. However, we argue that Apple's words about the A17 Pro chip at last week's Wanderlust event were somewhat exaggerated.

Apple markets the A17 Pro as the first smartphone chip manufactured with the 3-nanometer process, the smallest and most efficient chip manufacturing technology on the market today. We do not believe that Apple is misleading us about the use of this technology, but if the A17 Pro is indeed as strongly related to the older A16 chip as the codename suggests, then the A17 Pro may not be taking full advantage of it.

Ultimately what really matters is how the A17 Pro performs. iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max reviews have yet to arrive, but fortunately the leaked Geekbench 6 benchmarks show a decent performance improvement over the A16 suggests that the A16 is a good choice for the iPhone 15 Pro.

But even these benchmarks don't tell the full story; Geekbench is a CPU-specific benchmark, and the A17 Pro's new GPU, with one more core than the A16 and new ray-tracing capabilities, promises Apple's big It remains to be seen whether it will perform better than the A16, and we hope that the improvements here, in addition to the additional RAM that the iPhone 15 Pro apparently uses, will yield very impressive results despite the other similarities this chip has with Apple's older silicon.

iPhone 15 pre-orders are live until the full launch at the end of the week, but some models are in more demand than others, so check out our iPhone 15 Pro delay guide for the phones you could expect to order today to arrive for more information on when. You can also check out our iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max hands-on reviews for first impressions of these new iPhones.