The highly anticipated iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra are set to launch this September, powered by Apple's newest A-series chip. As with previous years, the next-generation processor will likely be split into two versions: a full-performance "Pro" model and a non-Pro model designed for lower-cost products. All products released this fall are expected to use the Pro version of the chip.
Although the exact capabilities of the new A-series chip remain unknown, we can anticipate its performance by examining the history and performance of the A-series processors from the past few years, along with recent rumors and industry trends. Apple's secrecy surrounding its products means that details are often not fully revealed until release, with some details kept under wraps even then.
The first 2nm iPhone chip, the A19 Pro, was made with TSMC's advanced 3-nanometer "N3E" process. TSMC is now ramping production of 2nm process technology, and the A20 Pro is expected to be Apple's first 2nm product. This new manufacturing process is expected to allow for about 15 percent higher transistor density for chips like Apple's, along with improvements to both performance and power usage.
The new process gives Apple more room for more cores, more cache, and higher-performance core designs while staying within the strict power and thermal budget required for a smartphone. It's also possible that the rumored iPhone Ultra and any iPhone Air successor could feature a somewhat handicapped version of the A20 chip.
Apple is also said to be using a new chip packaging process, called Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) packaging. This method of connecting parts of a multiple silicon dies together in a high-speed fashion is expected to provide for better cooling of the main A20 and RAM.
Apple's CPU performance improvements have been remarkably steady over time, with both single-core and multi-core performance showing a consistent increase year after year. The A20 Pro is likely to feature a 6-core CPU, with two performance and four efficiency cores. With the debut of the M5, Apple re-branded its performance cores to "Super Cores," a marketing move that may be repeated in the A20 Pro.
An estimated single-core CPU score of around 4,200 would place the A20 Pro in the same league as the M5, and way above the best Intel and AMD desktop processors or any processor found in any Android phone. When it comes to phone-capable chips, Apple is so far out ahead in single-core performance that it's hardly worth mentioning.
Multi-core performance is a different story, with Apple's CPU no slouch and likely to break 10,000 in the A20 Pro. However, some Android products reach this level, and most processors aimed at laptops and desktops feature far more than Apple's six cores, so naturally, multi-core performance benefits.
GPU performance is tricky, as it is used for both graphics rendering and parallel computing tasks like running machine learning algorithms. The GPU performance gain for Apple's A-series chips has been a little irregular, with sometimes significant changes to the architecture and other times just a higher clock speed.
The compute performance of Apple's GPU design took a big leap last year, and a boost of more than 10 percent seems reasonable this year. When it comes to performance in high-end 3D graphics rendering, as in AAA premium games, again we saw a big improvement with the new GPU architecture last year in the A19 Pro.
Over 50 frames per second in the 3DMark Solar Bay Unlimited benchmark would be a good result, which is over double the real-world graphics performance in just three years. On the less intensive Wild Life Unlimited benchmark, Apple passed the 100 frames per second threshold two years ago, so it's not crazy to think we could see a result over 150 this time.
The GPU is very important for local AI tasks, and that seems to be a major focus for Apple. The Neural Engine, a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit), is used in dozens of areas throughout your iPhone, from taking photos to recording audio without background noise to copying text out of an image.
The Neural Engine is used for running machine learning and AI tasks, and its performance doesn't necessarily scale with the "trillions of operations per second" statistic. Memory bandwidth, cache, and support for special compact data formats all play a big role in NPU performance.
Geekbench has a special separate AI benchmark that runs common machine learning and AI tasks on the CPU, GPU, or NPU. When we look at the results when running on the NPU, we see a big improvements, including a near-doubling in the last three years.
Beyond the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, the A20 Pro package will be paired with other critical components, including RAM, wireless chips, and a new chip packaging process. The RAM is a tricky one, with Apple likely to use high-speed LPDDR5x memory and maybe a wider memory bus.
AI also depends on having lots of RAM—LLMs are big. The A19 Pro has 12GB of RAM, while the regular A19 only has 8GB, and it already makes a difference: The new and improved dictation and more emotive Siri voice in iOS 27 require devices that have extra RAM. On the other hand, RAM prices have gone up more than 5x in the last year alone, making RAM super expensive.
Apple probably wants to attach 16GB of RAM to the A20 Pro, but we wouldn't be surprised to see 12GB, just because the market is totally nuts right now, even for Apple. The wireless chips are also expected to receive an upgrade, with the C2 modems likely to be used in the new iPhones, providing improved performance, added mmWave support, and improved battery life.
Apple has its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, the N1, which already supports Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 7. An N2 is not expected yet, but if an N1X that improves power efficiency is available, we wouldn't be surprised.
