What Apple's new A20 Pro chip means for you

Apple has built a new chip that lets your iPhone run AI features itself, without sending as much to the cloud. The A20 Pro, unveiled at Apple's "Surprise and Shine" event on 9 September 2026, is the company's most powerful chip yet and its first made on a smaller, more advanced manufacturing process called 2-nanometre, which refers to the tiny size of the transistors packed onto the chip.

Apple announced the A20 Pro alongside three new devices: the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the iPhone Duo, Apple's first folding phone, priced from $1,999. Prices on the iPhone 18 Pro line rose by $100. Apple also revealed new smartwatches and AirPods 5, according to CNBC. The standard iPhone 18 won't arrive until spring 2027.

The A20 Pro is the first high-volume smartphone chip built on TSMC's 2-nanometre process, according to MacRumors. Apple has also committed to producing some iPhone chips at TSMC's factories in Arizona.

The chip's Neural Engine, the part of the processor dedicated to AI tasks, now has 32 cores, up from its predecessor, and Apple says it delivers twice the computing power while using less energy. It also supports a new format called 8-bit floating point, which helps AI models run faster with less memory.

The CPU has six cores, including two new "supercores" that are 20% faster, plus four efficiency cores, all built with dedicated AI accelerators. The GPU has a new 7-core design that's up to 40% faster at graphics and twice as fast at the FP8 calculations used to run language models directly on the phone. Memory bandwidth, the speed at which the chip can move data, is up 50%.

Overall, Apple says the A20 Pro delivers 40% more sustained performance than last year's A19 Pro, and double that of the A18 Pro from two years ago.

Apple said the A20 Pro is "the ultimate chip for running advanced on-device models," adding it has "the widest memory interface we've ever shipped in an iPhone."

In practice, this means AI features on your phone, such as text and image generation, should run faster and use less battery, without needing an internet connection or sending your data to a server. The improved graphics and memory bandwidth should also help with gaming and video tasks.

The trade-off is cost: Apple raised iPhone 18 Pro prices by $100, and the new foldable iPhone Duo starts at $1,999.

The A20 Pro ships inside the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and iPhone Duo, all announced at Apple's 9 September event. Anyone wanting the standard iPhone 18 will need to wait until spring 2027. Apple's push into on-device AI comes as it tries to catch up in the wider AI race; in July it briefly overtook Nvidia as the world's most valuable company.