Apple has officially introduced the A20 Pro, describing it as the company's first chip fabricated on a next-generation 2nm process. According to Wccftech's report on the unveiling, the chip will power the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and iPhone Duo. A separate Wccftech report published ahead of the announcement said the entire iPhone lineup was expected to use the A20 Pro, so there is some inconsistency in how widely the chip will be deployed across the new iPhones.
On the CPU side, Apple kept a 6-core configuration—two performance cores and four efficiency cores—but says the new performance cores are 20 percent faster than those in the A19 Pro. Pre-announcement leaks attributed to a Weibo user had pointed to performance cores running at 4.90GHz and efficiency cores at 2.60GHz, and Apple's own materials reportedly confirm the 4.90GHz figure for the performance cores. Apple states every core now has its own Neural Accelerator, and the company claims the A20 Pro has the fastest CPU ever put in a smartphone.
The GPU moves to a 7-core design for the first time in an iPhone chip, which Apple says delivers up to 40 percent faster graphics performance. Earlier leaks had suggested each GPU core would run at 1.60GHz, a specific clock speed detail not mentioned in Apple's official unveiling. Leaked information also pointed to additional architectural details not confirmed by Apple, including 36MB of system-level cache (up from 32MB on the A19 Pro) and separate cache allocations of 16MB for the performance cores and 8MB for the efficiency cores.
For AI tasks, Apple has replaced the single Neural Engine with two units combining for 32 cores total, and says the new Neural Accelerators double FP8 performance compared to the previous generation. Leaked estimates ahead of the launch had put Neural Engine performance at more than 80 TOPS, a figure not repeated in Apple's official statements. Both the official unveiling and prior leaks agree that overall memory bandwidth increases by 50 percent versus the A19 Pro. Leaked details attributed this gain to widening the memory bus from 64 bits to 96 bits while still using LPDDR5X RAM, resulting in a bandwidth figure of 115.2GB/s and a transfer speed of 9,600MT/s—said to exceed the maximum memory bandwidth of Apple's M1, M2, and M3 chips, a comparison Apple's own unveiling also referenced regarding the M3.
Apple also redesigned the chip's physical packaging, moving away from the older InFO_PoP method to a new Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) approach. Instead of stacking DRAM directly on top of the A20 Pro, the memory is now placed beside it, which Apple says gives the chip more thermal headroom and helps sustain performance without the DRAM contributing to overheating. Apple did not disclose further technical specifications for the A20 Pro during its official unveiling.