New iPad mini 7 seems to have a binned version of the A17 Pro chip

Apple on Tuesday announced a new generation of the iPad mini, coming three years after the introduction of the iPad mini 6. From the outside, iPad mini 7 looks exactly the same as its predecessor, but there’s an important change inside: the A17 Pro chip. Although many have claimed that this is the same chip as the iPhone 15 Pro, it seems that the iPad mini 7 is powered by a binned version of the chip.

The A17 Pro chip was introduced last year with the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, and until then these were the only devices to have this chip. In the iPhone, the A17 Pro chip has a 6-core CPU and a 6-core GPU, as well as 8GB of RAM. While the chip in the iPad most likely also has 8GB of RAM, Apple’s website suggests that it uses a binned version of the chip with fewer cores.

More specifically, the iPad mini 7’s technical specifications say that the A17 Pro chip used in the tablet has a 6-core CPU, but a 5-core GPU – one less than the chip used in the iPhone 15 Pro. This doesn’t exactly come as a surprise since Apple has used binned chips in some of its devices before.

For those unfamiliar, chip binning is a quality control process in chip manufacturing. Rather than scrapping chips that haven’t reached the maximum performance of all their cores, some of them are deactivated and the chip can still be used with fewer cores.

It’s easy to assume that Apple had a bunch of A17 Pro chips lying around and decided to use them in the iPad mini 7 as the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max were discontinued in September. Since we’re only talking about one less GPU core, the overall performance of the chip probably won’t be affected for most tasks.