Apple has introduced the A20 Pro chip, the company's first mobile SoC manufactured using a 2nm process. This transition allows for higher transistor density and improved energy efficiency compared to previous generations.
The chip adopts Wafer-Level Multi-chip Module (WMCM) packaging, moving away from the traditional Package-on-Package (PoP) design. By placing the SoC and DRAM side-by-side, the design facilitates direct connection to a vapor chamber for better thermal management.
The new cooling system features four main components: a direct SoC thermal path, Metal Over Foam interface material, a vapor chamber three times larger than that of the iPhone 17 Pro, and a nano-twinned copper display backplane.
Performance improvements are significant: the iPhone 18 Pro delivers 40% higher sustained GPU performance than the iPhone 17 Pro, and nearly double the performance of the iPhone 16 Pro.
The A20 Pro incorporates Mac-derived architecture, including desktop-class performance cores, a 32-core neural engine (two 16-core units), and a 96-bit LPDDR5X memory interface, which increases memory bandwidth by 50%.
