The upcoming Apple A20 Pro chip, intended for the iPhone 18 Pro series, is currently in development using TSMC's 2nm process. It marks the first mobile processor from Apple to utilize the Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture, representing a significant shift in the chip's physical design.
Leaked engineering benchmarks indicate that the CPU's performance core (P-Core) frequency may reach 4.9GHz. This frequency level is intended to enhance single-core performance and handle complex computational tasks, moving closer to the performance metrics typically associated with desktop processors.
The graphics architecture has been expanded from the previous 6-core GPU design to a new 7-core configuration. This upgrade includes improvements to shader instruction parallelism, second-generation hardware ray tracing, and dynamic cache management, alongside a new Neural Engine for on-device AI.
To support increased performance, the memory subsystem has been overhauled to include LPDDR5X/LPDDR6 channels. The resulting memory bandwidth is reported to be comparable to the Apple M3 desktop chip, which provides approximately 100GB/s, facilitating high-resolution video processing and large-scale on-device AI models.
