Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro might look a lot like last year’s model on the outside, but there’s a genuinely interesting story happening inside. A new leak from tipster Abhishek Yadav, as reported by AndroidHeadlines, has spilled some real details about the A20 Pro chip, and a few things stand out.
Start with the CPU. Apple is sticking with a 6-core design, split into 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. That might raise eyebrows considering Qualcomm and Samsung are out here shipping chips with 8 to 10 cores. But Apple writes its own software, controls the whole stack, and honestly its chips have been embarrassing the competition for years. Core count stopped being a useful metric for Apple silicon a while ago. Still, we don’t know the clock speeds yet, and the move to TSMC’s 2nm process should push performance higher across the board.
The GPU is where things get more interesting. The A19 Pro had a 6-core GPU. The A20 Pro bumps that to 7 cores. One extra core sounds modest, but pair that with an 8MB L2 cache and a 96-bit LPDDR5X memory interface and you’re looking at a meaningful jump in memory bandwidth. That matters a lot more than people realize, because memory bandwidth is often the choke point when running large language models on a phone. With Apple pushing harder on Apple Intelligence features, this chip is clearly built with on-device AI performance in mind. The hardware and the software strategy are telling the same story here.
So who actually gets the A20 Pro? Almost certainly the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and the rumored foldable Ultra. The base iPhone 18 will likely run a standard A20 chip, which based on past patterns could mean a smaller cache, fewer GPU cores, and less RAM. Apple has played this tier game for a few years now, keeping its most capable silicon locked to the premium models.
To be fair, that’s speculation based on the A19 versus A19 Pro split. Nothing is confirmed yet on the regular A20. But the A20 Pro is shaping up to be a chip that earns its “Pro” label, especially for anyone who cares about AI performance and mobile gaming.