Apple has taken the wraps off the iPhone 17e, and the first thing we did was dive into the specifications page of the iPhone 16e’s successor to find out if the A19 shared some similarities with the same silicon found in the base iPhone 17. It turns out that there’s just one difference, and it is the same one present in the iPhone 16e and the base iPhone 16.
Like before, the iPhone 17e features a binned A19 with fewer GPU cores than the silicon running in the iPhone 17
Scrolling through the ‘Tech Specs’ section of the iPhone 17e, we found exactly what we were looking for. The A19 featured in the device sports a 6-core CPU with two performance and four efficiency cores, along with a 4-core GPU. Apart from sporting one GPU core less than the iPhone 17’s A19, everything else remains consistent, such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and a 16-core Neural Engine. To be fair, this isn’t the first time that Apple has resorted to chip-binning, and it isn’t going to be the last.
As mentioned above, the iPhone 16e features a binned A18 with four GPU cores, resulting in a 10 percent performance penalty compared to the A16 Bionic when running 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited. When compared to the iPhone 16’s A19, the iPhone 16e’s SoC obtains a 15 percent lower score in Geekbench 6 Metal. We should expect more or less the same results when the iPhone 17e is benchmarked in the coming days, with chip-binning one of the primary reasons why Apple can maintain that $599 while offering double the storage of the base iPhone 16e.
If you’re still disappointed about Apple using an inferior version of A19, we’d like to remind you that the iPhone 17e ships with the significantly more powerful C1X 5G modem, the same part found in the more expensive iPhone Air, so it is not like Apple has presented nothing but downgrades in the latest iPhone model.
About the author: Omar Sohail is a reporter and analyst for Wccftech's mobile section, specializing in the technology and business of the mobile industry. His expertise lies in the intricate hardware supply chain, covering developments in semiconductor manufacturing, chip lithography, and camera sensor technology.
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