The average width of a human hair is around 50 to 120 micrometers (µm), or anywhere between three and five thousandths of an inch. Now let’s take five thousandths (0.005) of an inch and divide it by 63,500, which equals 2 nanometers – that is the transistor size inside the A20 Pro chip powering iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, and 18 Pro Max.
It has a physically redesigned SOC inspired by M-series, where the memory chips are now placed alongside the main silicon die. This allows for much better heat dissipation into the vapor chamber for better sustained performance, plus, the memory bandwidth was bumped by 50% to 113.7 GB/s*. This article compares the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro, M1 MacBook Air, and M4 MacBook Air chips head to head in Geekbench 6.7.x.
How does A20 Pro compare to A19 Pro?
There are a number of noteworthy upgrades to the A20 Pro which weren’t included in the Apple event, which includes an increased CPU clock speed, L1 instruction cache, L1 data cache, and L2 cache as well. A20 Pro now runs up to an incredible 4.93 GHz clock speed, up from A19 Pro’s 4.26 GHz.
Link to CPU comparison: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/19144650?baseline=19145605
Link to GPU comparison: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/compute/compare/6873585?baseline=6872651
Over double Single Core & Metal GPU performance vs. M1.
Nearly 6 years ago, Apple debuted the M1 chip as their first generation of Apple Silicon for Macs. A20 Pro has more than double the Single Core CPU performance and GPU performance of an M1 chip, and nearly matches the M4 in Multi core CPU. This is more or less desktop class performance.
While artificial benchmarks don’t fully represent the picture created by the numbers, nor do they factor in the experiential difference of the many devices, the fact remains still it can give us an idea of relative performance. The idea here is it’s like a water pressure test – how much pressure can the system perform under, and how can it perform relative to other devices?
(Above: Source – Apple)