Abstract:
Apple officially announced the A20 Pro chip at a new product launch conference on September 9 and confirmed that this chip will be installed on the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. The A20 Pro uses a new 2-nanometer process technology and is Apple's first smartphone chip based on this process, marking the official entry of mobile phone processors into a more advanced process stage.
Apple said that the A20 Pro uses a six-core CPU architecture, including two new ultra-large cores and four efficiency cores. Among them, the performance of the two ultra-large cores can be increased by up to 20%. Apple claims that it has "desktop-level" performance and is currently the fastest processor core in smartphones. The efficiency core is mainly responsible for handling daily tasks to reduce power consumption and improve overall energy efficiency.
In terms of GPU, the A20 Pro has been redesigned and adopts a seven-core architecture. Apple claims that the graphics performance of the new GPU is increased by up to 40%, and it also has higher memory bandwidth, which can more effectively handle games, graphics processing and other high-load tasks. A new neural accelerator has also been added inside the GPU, making its FP8 floating-point computing performance twice that of the previous generation, helping to run larger language models locally on the device.
The A20 Pro also adds a neural engine, bringing the total number of cores in the entire chip to 32. Apple said that the redesigned neural engine has twice the computing power of the previous generation, is more energy efficient, and supports 8-bit floating point operations. Apple calls the A20 Pro the ideal chip for running advanced end-side artificial intelligence models and says the chip is equipped with the widest memory interface Apple has ever used on an iPhone.
Apple particularly emphasizes that whether the performance of the A20 Pro can be continuously released depends largely on the heat dissipation capabilities of the iPhone 18 Pro. To this end, Apple has redesigned the chip packaging method, using a custom package inspired by the M series chips, and directly connecting the chip silicon wafer and memory to the vapor chamber inside the phone to improve heat conduction and heat dissipation performance.
In terms of sustained performance, Apple said that the iPhone 18 Pro equipped with A20 Pro has a 40% improvement in sustained performance compared to the iPhone 17 Pro equipped with A19 Pro; compared with the iPhone 16 Pro equipped with A18 Pro, the sustained performance is doubled. Apple’s emphasis on sustained performance this time means that the A20 Pro not only pursues peak speeds in a short period of time, but also attempts to maintain higher performance levels during long-term gaming, video processing and local artificial intelligence operations.
The release of the A20 Pro also makes Apple one of the first manufacturers to introduce the 2nm process into large-scale consumer smartphones. Compared with the previous continuous use of multiple generations of 3nm processes, the 2nm process can integrate more transistors in a smaller chip area and is expected to simultaneously improve performance, power consumption and heating performance. For smartphones that increasingly rely on local artificial intelligence processing capabilities, this process upgrade not only means an increase in operating speed, but will also provide a hardware foundation for more complex end-side AI functions.
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